Among the invisible cities, some hold by a mere breath.
They unfold like membranes,
rising beneath the skin of the ground.
They are at once organs and architectures,
buried presences ready to emerge.

Walls split, floors hollow, objects open to reveal what dwells beneath: materials, forms, flows that belong as much to the biological as to the mechanical. The exhibition space, usually perceived as aseptic, alters to unveil an underground vitality — entangled, multisystemic. From these fissures emerge respiratory systems, conduits, excrescences: entomological, organo-industrial forms, porous interfaces between bodies, species and machines — like the work “Rift”, both protrusion and suture.
After “Chloroplast Machinery” at CAP Saint-Fons in June 2025, the first institutional exhibition dedicated to their practice, the duo Xolo Cuintle (Romy Texier & Valentin Vie Binet) presents at DS Galerie their new solo exhibition: “Pulses Within”. This new stage extends their research: after the exploration of an industrial landscape, “Pulses Within” turns toward an archaeology of the living. Here, space is no longer a neutral device but an organism in mutation. It rises, sinks, reveals its organic depth. The gallery becomes a transforming body, a machine-organ crossed by invisible exchanges.
As if belonging to a shared respiratory infrastructure, visible only through its outer fragments, “Breathing Piping System” unfolds as a partial network, devoid of a centre and open to imaginary extensions.
Within this fragmentary system, a she-wolf emerges. A direct reference to the founding myth of Romulus and Remus, she appears less as allegory than as the reminiscence of an archaic tale inscribed in matter: that of a perpetual genesis.
No less recurrent is the figure of the seed, present in the duo’s bas-reliefs, of which the work “Reservoir Seed” is the totem. An elemental form — ovoid, closed, fissured — the seed embodies the intermediate state: both subterranean and awaiting germination. It inscribes the idea of latency, a circulating potential that traverses the entire exhibition.
Through a singular sculptural language, Xolo Cuintle summons a multicellular, interconnected world, between myth and anticipation. On the ground, a pair of sleeping dogs keeps watch: guardians between worlds — above and below, outside and inside, the living and the elsewhere. Concrete, wood, ceramic — far from inert — are conceived as fertile soil, a geological skin traversed by invisible currents. They awaken symbioses, circulations, mechanisms of life, blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, between structure and the biological.
The works reveal the porosity between living and non-living, inviting us to rethink our bonds with beings, spaces, and the invisible breaths that traverse them. Through “Pulses Within,” Xolo Cuintle erects neither fable nor theory, but a terrain. Like clues, the forms remain in a state of hypothesis, ready to reconfigure.

Text | Ulysse Feuvrier & Thomas Havet