L’Été des serpents (2025)

In the shadow of a techno-feudalism that condemns us to live as fearful vassals, Nathalie Rey emerges as a voice that, from within precarity, challenges the established order. L’Été des serpents unfolds through four multimedia installations that desecrate what has been made sacred—an act that seeks not only to destroy, but to subvert and to restore the human to its rightful place.

Along this path, Rey finds an unavoidable reference in Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002), a pioneer who turned desecration into a weapon of catharsis. Marked by sexual abuse at the age of eleven—the ultimate profanation of childhood, described under the title of this exhibition in her memoirs—Saint Phalle transformed pain into art through her shooting paintings, firing bullets at canvases to break the sacred process of painting, a cry of resistance against the violence she endured.

Rey, without carrying that personal wound, takes up this legacy and adapts it to the continuous violations she faces, as a woman and as an artist, in a technocratic world.

Text by Jordi Garrido

L’Été des serpents was presented at the Arranz-Bravo Foundation and at L’Estruch Creation Factory in Catalonia in 2025.

Photos by Josechu Tercero

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