Gerard & Kelly transform Villa Benkemoun into a living clock
During the opening week of Les Rencontres d’Arles, American artists Gerard & Kelly present On Time, a site-specific project conceived for Villa Benkemoun that temporarily returns Émile Sala’s 1970s organic residence to everyday life. The activation marks the latest chapter in the Paris-based artists’ ongoing exploration of modernist architecture, following interventions at landmarks including Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Eileen Gray’s E-1027, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and the R.M. Schindler House. At Villa Benkemoun, however, the focus shifts from architectural icon to lived experience, asking how a house that has become a museum might once again function as a home.
Conceived around their performance Clockwork, Gerard & Kelly’s On Time centers on the presence of two performers who sleep inside the villa at night and activate it during the day. At scheduled moments, they move through its rooms, speaking fragments of memory, dancing, and tracing choreographed paths that respond to the spatial logic of the building. Over the course of four days, the house itself becomes a clock, with bodies and voices serving as its moving hands.
For curator Raphaël Giannesini, the project grew directly from Villa Benkemoun’s evolving identity. Invited by Brigitte Benkemoun, daughter of the family who commissioned the house, he has been developing an artistic program that positions the villa as a place capable of generating new forms of inhabitation. After an initial exhibition celebrating the villa’s history through archival objects and documents, he sought a radically different approach.‘This house has become a museum, but how can we get back to the original house? After all, it’s a place to live,’ Giannesini tells designboom.
all images by Pauline Scotto Di Cesare | creative and executive production by Bureau Future. © Adagp Paris, 2026
when a museum becomes a home again
Gerard & Kelly intentionally remove many of the existing objects from the interior, allowing the villa’s architecture to stand out. The spaces come alive by movement, gesture, and everyday rituals. The performers become temporary inhabitants whose personal memories intertwine with those embedded within the house itself, blurring the distinction between lived experience and historical recollection.
That approach resonates with the artists’ broader practice, which examines the relationship between choreography and modern architecture. While previous works unfolded within canonical houses closely associated with figures such as Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, Villa Benkemoun presents a different proposition. Designed by French architect Émile Sala in the early 1970s, the residence carries the accumulated traces of family life alongside its architectural ambitions, offering what Giannesini describes as ‘a lived modernism.’
the performance extends beyond the house into Villa Benkemoun’s curving outdoor spaces
where architecture keeps time
The building informs the performance. Sala conceived the villa through flowing curves that connect interior spaces with the landscape, while its distinctive tower introduces a vertical axis that draws attention to the passing of time. Giannesini suggests that the house is ‘more a subject of time than of space,’ noting that the performers effectively become the clock’s hands as they circulate through the architecture. Their movements are not imposed upon the villa but respond to its geometry, rhythms, and circulation. As the curator puts it, ‘the villa itself is a dancing villa.’
Alongside the performances, Gerard & Kelly introduce a handful of works that echo the project’s focus on time, from opposing digital clocks to a score drawing and Défense de rire (2025), a wall lamp that illuminates each passing hour. Spread across the villa, the interventions become part of the experience. Over three days, the villa is inhabited once again. Performers sleep there at night and return to its spaces throughout the day, tracing familiar routes and everyday gestures that bring a different pace to the house during the opening week of Les Rencontres d’Arles.
Émile Sala’s flowing architecture frames the performers during On Time
Gerard & Kelly activate Villa Benkemoun