The French Haute Maroquinerie House has partnered with the artistic, social, and economic association Home Affairs to launch a one-year artist residency inside its workshops in Tergnier.
Two visions of creation. These words aptly describe the new project spearheaded by Camille Fournet. Since June 2025, and for one year, several artists have taken up residence in the brand’s expanding manufacture.
A dual perspective on art and craftsmanship
In Tergnier, between Amiens and Reims, the Camille Fournet manufacture is embracing art. To achieve this, it collaborated with Home Affairs, an artistic, social, and economic platform that creates experimental work environments for artists and designers in factories and construction sites. These creators can draw inspiration from the production elements of these sites and reinvent them in new forms.
These expanding workshops are the ideal setting for nurturing artistic creativity. It all began with an invitation extended in 2023 by Camille Fournet to Oriane Déchery, the founder of Home Affairs, who in turn invited three other artists and designers to join the residency alongside the brand’s employees. This gave rise to a project with two intertwined dimensions. All the artists were able to use raw materials from the workshop—most notably leather—to create works that now adorn the various spaces.
Oriane Déchery, the pioneering artist
Oriane Déchery, a central figure in this project, is a French visual artist born in 1983 and based in Paris. During the residency, she co-created artworks and objects with other artists using materials from the manufacture and the construction site, exploring notions of labor, reuse, and domestic fiction. Her approach is profoundly collaborative and grounded in reality: she questions production processes, everyday materials, and interactions with artisans.
During the residency, she closely observed the artisans’ gestures and was inspired by a particular object: cotton gloves used to wipe tools after coloring, which resemble small paintings. The artist sculpted three large hands representing the gestures of three female workers. These sculptures, mounted on wheels, are mobile yet frozen in their movements—an inversion of the artisans, whose gestures are continuous but whose bodies remain still. The sculptures’ coverings are made from shredded administrative documents from the manufacture, transformed into paper pulp. In another piece, Oriane asked about a hundred artisans to stop working momentarily so she could photograph their hands. She then permanently affixed these images in the management offices where decisions are made. “A way to put the supervised bodies of artisans back at the center, to restore their agency,” the project explains.
Plural and complementary artists
Designer and scenographer Romain Guillet spent a year in residence at Tergnier. Inspired by the machines and the daily lives of those who operate them, he created two works exploring the relationship between the body and production. The first is a series of magnetic accessories scattered throughout the manufacture—buttons, levers, cranks, or silicone body fragments. By repurposing machine control elements, Romain proposes a “poetic hacking” that disrupts productivity and highlights the human presence behind the mechanics. The second work is a monumental folding screen made of recycled leather, a common material in the manufacture. Inspired by alligator scale patterns, it reinterprets luxury codes: a modular, economical, and reproducible piece designed to dialogue with the new building’s architecture. These creations reflect a desire to integrate into the industrial space while subtly transforming it.
For her part, Virginie Yassef brought a perspective combining history and anthropology. Her research led her to the banks of the Mississippi, home to alligator farms. From there, she traced a historical thread back to the Natchez, an Indigenous people who once lived in this region. Using these historical clues, she began imagining a series of works. Three mobile crocodilian rocks—titled Pierre (1), Pierre (2), and Pierre (3)—can be moved throughout the manufacture and are accompanied by three banners called Serpent piqué (1,2,3). These banners feature enigmatic designs crafted from discs made from unused scraps of alligator skin, assembled on crumpled silver emergency blankets. Each rock has eyes and seems to fossilize memory, silently observing everything.
For this manufacturing experience, visual artist Maria Alcaide—who also works with video, text, and installations—conceived two pieces: Manufacture Landscape and Portraits of the Manufactures. These twin works, which converse with each other, are displayed in each building of the manufacture. Maria observed the artisans at work—their gestures, the precision of their hands—and one day noticed that many workers bore tattoos. To her, these tattoos symbolize social class and are an essential element in portraying the contemporary working class. A direct connection emerges between animal skin and human skin. In this second piece, Maria explores inverted processes: she uses a skin framework that reveals voids, which she fills with other materials and photographs evoking those gaps and absences. The installation is designed for Camille Fournet’s new, empty building.
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Featured photo : Work by Oriane Déchery © Home Affairs / Camille Fournet
