In 2020, set designer Ardita Meha and photographer Cécilia Poupon began a unique collaboration centered around the process of mold formation. During her residency at the Fondation Le Corbusier, Ardita started observing the transformation of forgotten food, allowing time and humidity to gradually reshape their appearance. Fascinated by these silent metamorphoses, Cécilia set out to capture them through photography, revealing another dimension of the process: an unexpected beauty emerging from decay.

Through their work, Ardita and Cécilia explore the idea that even in deterioration and loss, a form of aesthetics and renewal can arise.
Mold, initially invisible, silently spreads across the surface of fruits and vegetables, decomposing and transforming them until they become unrecognizable. This phenomenon—often viewed with disgust—becomes, through Cécilia’s lens, an unprecedented visual language, where textures, colors, and forms reveal themselves in all their complexity. The everyday, in its most mundane aspects, is transformed into an unexpected territory of exploration, where the infinitely small converses with the infinitely vast.

By rethinking our relationship to decay and the passage of time, this series invites us to see differently. At the frontier between repulsion and fascination, it challenges our gaze and pushes us to discover the hidden beauty within the imperceptible. Perhaps it is precisely in this fragile balance between destruction and rebirth that the true essence of art resides.