In a system isolated from the outside world, entropy (disorder) tends to increase. This is an irreversible process: nothing returns to its original state on its own.

Living beings, by contrast, sustain their internal order through exchanges with their surroundings, at the cost of releasing disorder into them. Alejandro Leonhardt and Dasha Shishkin work with these two aspects of life: he contains, reassembling the fragments of a past collapse; she overflows, allowing energy to circulate between bodies that affect one another and blur together.

As we enter, an office shelving unit laden with red security boxes cuts across the room, restricting access to a passageway. Among these shelves and other remnants of an old bank recovered by Leonhardt, Shishkin’s characters introduce a human vibration: repeating profiles, accumulating faces. The two presences coexist in apparent harmony until, on the first floor, each claims its own territory.

Leonhardt has devoted his residency at Florit/Florit to…