Lito Kattou

Purposes : Nights & Days

Or Associations at Basel Social Club 2026 : The Office

With Raffaela Boss and Azur Sabic


Throughout the meeting room, Purposes (2024) : as a dispersed constellation of sculptures, propose another order of relations, and the office becomes a landscape inhabited by wandering forces rather than managed systems.
Across metal spheres, symbols of both Gaia and the cosmos, flat mantises balance in states of perpetual suspension. Mantises, believed by cultures to have supernatural powers or perceived as femme fatales, are here on a constant balance between ruling and rolling, resting and rising and in a relentless play, embodying both dominance and fragility.
Personifications of Night and Day behold the order of time within the alienation of the office set up and activate the spheres potentially into another realm. Their mesmerising movements and bodies shadow the mantisses’ endless strolls and create shelters of ‘sky’ for their orbits, crafted composedly by their garments and postures.
The performers are wearing similar attire. Oversized blazer suits tailormade for their duties: the ordering of time. A total black blazer for Night, a printed textile one for Day. When the performance is not taking place, The blazers are left hanging on the back of the chairs found in the space.
The print used for the textiles of Day’s blazer, derive from the painting of the series ‘Sunsets’ (2021-ongoing) present throughout the practice of the artist. Incandescent sunsets and sunrises of a personal archive from the East Mediterranean sky related to the artist background, comment throughout her installations to the connection of human to the other-than-human condition, the non-linearity of time, the banality of quotidian images and the ecological devastation of the area.
The human bodies produce a control that might have now been dissolved under the alienation of the office set up. As their body parts shadow the mantises, the scenography oscillates between assembled scales crafted composedly by garments and postures.


*Lito Kattou, Purposes : Nights & Days, 2026 | Purposes I,III,IV,V,VI, 2024, nickel, 15 x 15 x 25 cm, custom made blazers, digital print on textile, furniture