Charlotte Thrane, Everest Life at DISPLAY, Parma

Everest Life by Charlotte Thrane, curated by Ilaria Monti, at DISPLAY, Parma, 13.12.2025 – 25.01.2026. 

There are objects that stop being objects. They shed their function, flake off from daily gestures, and yet retain something. Tiny, stubborn remnants, like words caught on the tongue after a dream. Stepping into Everest Life feels like entering a waiting room outside of time: everything is still, yet it hums. I wonder, as my gaze stumbles over a smooth curve, a halo of dust, a strand of hair that shouldn’t be there, what remains of pleasure once pleasure evaporates? And what becomes of the body, once it has shed its shell?

Inside DISPLAY in Parma, Charlotte Thrane has composed a poetic graveyard of domesticity, a monument to prefab comfort stripped of its name. The hot tubs, once labeled with catalog names like “Tahiti,” “Eden,” “Dream,” now reappear in clusters, altered, stacked like tectonic plates of a landscape that no longer serves. No longer functional objects, but remnants, husks, matter that becomes memory.

The installation draws on the architecture of the space with almost musical precision: the arched glass façade and its internal echo are mirrored in the soft profiles of the tubs, arranged in a spiral that leads the eye toward a hypothetical center, like a drain. There’s a sense of still motion, a tension between centrifugal force and centripetal pull: the show unfolds in a loop, repeating itself, drawing you in. Silence is thick, interrupted only by the sound of your own steps. The glossy white of the surfaces, dulled by dust and natural light, mimics corrupted marble, an industrial echo of the Baroque, or, as curator Ilaria Monti suggests, a “synthetic Baroque,” feeding on contradictions: spectacle and oblivion, luxury and decay, the body and its absence.

On a material level, Thrane works like a ruin artisan, layering surfaces not to restore, but to reveal. The reference to stucco lustro is no accident: as with that Renaissance technique, depth arises from the skin. But here, the skin is fiberglass, polished and then forsaken. The gesture cools, becomes calculation, yet retains a subtle emotional thread, like a strand of hair forgotten. Some belong to the artist’s own family: they are there, visible, unnecessarily intimate, and precisely for that reason, disarming.

Everest Life doesn’t offer a linear narrative, but an immersion in ambiguity. It’s a show you feel in your gut before you grasp it with your eyes. The pleasure once promised by these tubs, wellness, immersion, sensory escape, is here deconstructed, emptied out, almost mummified. And yet, in that emptiness, something human remains, something that refuses to die.

Like the faint smell of sun-warmed plastic, you know the one, and the muffled crunch of footsteps on courtyard gravel. We walk away with a question we can’t quite shape, and the precise feeling that some things, once lost, shine more brightly.