There is something about the red of the Croisette that refuses to fully vanish. Even when it is rolled up, stored away, or replaced, it lingers — not as an object, but as a residue of sensation. It survives in the memory of those who have climbed the steps of the Cannes Film Festival, in the afterimage of camera flashes, in the collective choreography of bodies that briefly turn a staircase into a global stage. At Cannes, nothing is ever just material; everything becomes trace.
At La Malmaison, facing a Mediterranean that seems to hold its own indifferent continuity, that same red is no longer surface or symbol. It becomes matter under pressure. In WE ARE ALL CONNECTED SOMEHOW, Didier Zakine takes the festival’s most recognisable visual element — the red carpet — and removes it from its function, from its choreography of arrival and exposure. What remains is not a representation of cinema, but a decomposition of its ritual skin.
The gesture is disarmingly simple. And perhaps for that reason, slightly unsettling. Zakine rescues what is designed to disappear.
The works unfold as fragmented terrains of red textile, folded and reconfigured into rhythms that resist immediate reading. They do not announce themselves as images, nor do they resolve into narrative clarity. Instead, they insist on duration. On texture. On the slow recognition that what we are looking at is not decoration, but accumulation — a material that has already lived another life under thousands of steps, cameras, and performances.
There is an architectural logic running through the installation, as if the pieces were remembering the space they once defined. The repetition of lines, the vertical tensions, the almost structural order of the compositions inevitably evoke the geometry of the Palais des Festivals: its steps, its ascents, its ritualised movement from street to screen. Yet there is another reading that quietly emerges. The same repetitions begin to resemble film frames — sequential, mechanical, endlessly advancing. The festival itself starts to feel less like an annual event and more like an unbroken projection, looping through time.
Zakine’s intervention exists in the unstable space between the sacred and the disposable. The red carpet, in the global imagination, carries an aura of permanence — a ceremonial threshold where cinema becomes spectacle. But in reality, it is a temporary object, installed and dismantled with industrial precision. It is both iconic and expendable. This contradiction is precisely where the work finds its tension.
By isolating and transforming the carpet, Zakine reverses its logic. What was background becomes subject. What was designed for passage becomes something to be contemplated. The ephemeral is given density, almost stubborn weight. Not through monumentality, but through attention — an insistence on looking longer than the system usually allows.
Inside La Malmaison, that shift feels particularly acute. The space does not neutralise the work; it amplifies its fragility. Natural light moves across the folded surfaces, changing their temperature, their emotional register. At times the material seems almost to breathe, as if it still remembers the friction of bodies, the heat of expectation, the brief violence of visibility that defines Cannes during festival days.
Outside, the Croisette continues its familiar rhythm. Conversations dissolve into terraces. Deals are half-whispered over coffee. Critics reassemble meaning before films have even finished. The festival operates at a speed that leaves little room for reflection — a system designed to produce discourse faster than it can be absorbed.
Against that velocity, Zakine’s work introduces a form of resistance that is almost imperceptible. It does not interrupt the festival; it decelerates its memory. It asks what remains once the images have already passed through their cycle of attention.
This is not nostalgia, nor critique in the conventional sense. There is no longing for a purer cinema, nor a denunciation of spectacle. Instead, there is a more precise inquiry into residue — into what survives when cinema is no longer present as event but persists as material echo. Folds. Layers. Pressure marks. The physical vocabulary of something that once carried meaning through visibility.
In that sense, WE ARE ALL CONNECTED SOMEHOW positions itself less as an exhibition about cinema and more as a reflection on its aftermath. It belongs to a broader contemporary sensibility that treats memory not as narrative continuity, but as fragmented surface — something that can be touched, reorganised, re-read without ever fully resolving.
And yet, what makes Zakine’s approach distinct is its refusal of grand statements. There is no attempt to monumentalise the red carpet, no desire to transform it into an icon of critique or celebration. Instead, the work holds itself in a quieter register: observational, restrained, almost hesitant in its own clarity.
Perhaps that is why it resonates within the context of Cannes. Because the festival, for all its spectacle, is also an architecture of disappearance. Films arrive, are seen, and immediately begin to fade into discourse, memory, and industry circulation. Everything here is transient, even when it appears permanent.
Zakine’s red does not try to fix that instability. It simply makes it visible.
And as one moves through La Malmaison, there is a moment where the work stops reading as installation and starts behaving like memory itself — not linear, not stable, but layered, slightly out of reach. Something that has been walked on too many times to remain intact, and yet refuses to disappear completely.
The red carpet, once a threshold, becomes something closer to evidence. Not of glamour, nor of spectacle, but of passage — of everything that has crossed it and no longer remains.
And in that transformation, Zakine leaves the viewer with no conclusion, only a quiet disorientation. A sense that what we call cinema may not end when the screen goes dark, but when its materials finally stop remembering us.