In the early-20th-century dispersal of faint waiting rooms and caring wings, Jenna Kaës has sown an uncanny bloom: AURARIUM, a delicate conjuration at Le Voyage à Nantes, where a former tuberculosis dispensary becomes an altar to memory’s tremors.

Kaës orchestrates a subtle séance, inviting visitors into an architecture haunted not by phantoms but by feelings—by the tender deadweight of what we cannot fully name.

Kaës—trained in design yet ever defiant of its functional constraints—positioned herself at “the crossroads of design, decorative arts, and installations, where forms dialogue with symbols, forgotten tales, and ritual gestures.” Her materials—glass, metal, textiles, precious stones—are never mere carriers; they are emissaries of poetics, “vectors of a symbolic, archaic, and often sacred language.” In AURARIUM, each object is a hieroglyph, each surface a quiet invocation.

The Dispensaire Jean V, once conceived between 1903 and 1906 to cradle those in physical fragility, is reimagined as a secular reliquary. The light‑strewn central hall—its symmetry and openness a formal echo of care—is transformed into a luminous pulse, a heart around which chambers coil like intimate shrines. Kaës doesn’t restore history; she activates its breath. The exhibition rooms unfurl “like secular chapels or intimate tableaux,” each room an alchemical blend of antiques from Musée Dobrée and Kaës’s own creations that float in an uncanny suspension between dream and ritual.

Textures do strange things here—they expand and hollow, mediate illumination, fragment histories. Motifs plucked from Nantes’s medieval grotesques, friezes, and bestiaries are reinterpreted until they become something spectral: “floating, almost mystical signs.” It’s as if Kaës is not so much reconstructing the dispensary’s past as pinpointing the memory lodged in its walls, waiting to glow again.

What interests me is how AURARIUM resists clear articulation. Kaës asks: How can we materialize the invisible? Her answer comes not in literal symbolism but through gestures that feel remembered rather than explained. The viewer doesn’t witness so much as wander: enveloped by an atmosphere of care, uncanny resonance, and absence. The objects don’t tell us how to mourn—they allow mourning’s silhouettes to settle.

Consider the tableau with repurposed light fixtures—a constellation alive in that central chamber. Light fractures across glass, textile, metal, surfacing as a kind of inner anatomy of the dispensary. The building becomes itself an actor in this rite; its corridors and chambers pulse with “benevolent and sacred, mysterious ghosts who heal.”

This is where Kaës’s art gains its moral weight: she doesn’t aestheticize suffering, nor does she sentimentalize memory. Instead, she summons a presence—a whisper, a trace—inscribed in silent material forms. The clinic’s history—of isolation, convalescence, philanthropic ambition by Thomas Dobrée—is not erased but intoned, as though memory and matter conspire in a shared breath.

Each antique, each new object, each architectural nuance resists easy narrative but hums with a latent, almost pre‑linguistic knowledge.