(capsules) is a series of temporary installations that take over vacant shop windows, bringing contemporary art proposals to unexpected corners of the city and opening up urban spaces to contemporary creation 24/7.
(capsules) benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
With the kind support of ERCO
Andrea Vamos
Les trous dans l'histoire
Location
6-8, rue Jean Origer
L-2269 Luxembourg
The installation proposed for Capsules turns the shop window into an old device for collective distribution that is still running, but whose symbolic content has been punched out. Using a set of Yugoslav postcards showing spomeniks, the antifascist memorial monuments of the former Yugoslavia, the project examines how political narratives and the visual forms of political coexistence circulate today.
Originally made as popular objects for mass distribution, these postcards helped spread a collective imaginary, a federal identity and a vision of living together promoted by socialist Yugoslavia. As miniature versions of the monuments, they carried the symbolic and political function of the spomeniks into the domestic space.
The postcards are assembled into a large patchwork covering the whole window pane. The silhouettes of the monuments are cut out by hand, creating areas of transparency through which passers-by look into the window. Behind them hangs a work from the series Archives of Monuments, visible only through these cut-outs. Passers-by first see an appealing, modernist, colorful composition that feels almost like an advertisement. Then they notice the monuments are missing. The eye searches for what once structured these images and can only reach the interior space through these absences. Visual desire keeps working even though its ideological center has disappeared. The window thus becomes less an exhibition space than a distribution apparatus that is still operational, inherited from the commercial and ideological logics of collective diffusion. The installation probes the closeness between the commercial image and the image of an ideal society: how do images continue to produce collective desire today, even though the ideologies that once structured them have vanished?
Biography
Andréa Vamos's work explores the geopolitical legacy and the scars of memory left by the historical ruptures of the twentieth century. A French-Yugoslav artist, she grounds her practice in a critical rereading of the Balkans.
Her approach centers on intervening in and deconstructing public archival images, especially those drawn from state propaganda. At the heart of this research is the confrontation between monumental collective memory, which is often instrumentalized, and fragmented individual memory. She works on these images to reveal the gap between what is visible (the official narrative) and what is invisible (the fracture, the decline).
Each project begins with a rigorous documentary phase, often carried out on site in the territory itself. She then creates installations and/or ephemeral interventions that aim to conceal in order to show better, and to rewrite the narrative through a personal gesture. This physical action sets the fragility of an individual construction against the monumentality of frozen history. Her gesture focuses on the appearance and erasure of the image (printing in the broad sense). For each new project, she chooses a highly symbolic medium to underline the need for protection against amnesia, writing her own story of survival over the state's older script.
Because the intervention is ephemeral, photography serves as the lasting archive that captures the moment when the double reading was activated. This work points to a fundamental need: to belong to a shared and clear-sighted history, essential to breaking down borders, and it offers a reflection on resilience in the face of the complex history of the present.
Her work has been shown in France, Serbia and Montenegro. In 2024, she was a laureate of the Elles & la Cité program, launched by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2026, she is exhibiting at the Centre d'art contemporain Tignous in Montreuil.
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