by Eve Rogers, studio photos by Olivia Noss // Jan. 23, 2026
As we pause in a gray courtyard in the shadow of Kottbusser Tor, sharing quiet delight at the rare appearance of sun in a mid-December sky, the light feels provisional, like something the city has borrowed and will soon have to return. Slipping between buildings at a low angle, it is already tinged with loss as we stand one week shy of the shortest day of the year. Myriam Jacob-Allard appears through a heavy door and greets us with an easy warmth, scooping us up and welcoming us into her world.
We are immediately absorbed by an unexpected color-drenched stairwell in Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Every surface is saturated in a dense, glowing yellow that reads unmistakably as egg yolk, insulating us from the outside in as we make our ascent. We turn into a long hallway whose fragrant freshly waxed floor catches the light, reflecting it back upward so that the corridor seems to glow beneath our feet.
Inside, despite the looming pre-solstice sunset, the studio is filled with light that seems to have learned how to linger. Large windows pull in what daylight remains and distribute it generously across the room. Jacob-Allard remarks casually that she sometimes forgets she even has lamps, so bright is the workspace.
Upon entering the studio, there is a momentary sense of having stumbled upon a rehearsal for a stage production of Beauty and the Beast, the floor alive with animatronic domestic objects carrying out their appointed tasks. A motorized papier-mâché broom sweeps the ground with steady persistence, lifting itself slightly before landing with a heavy, resonant thump that settles sharply in my chest. Nearby, a familiar white-and-blue iron hesitates before gliding forward along the laminate. A robotic arm lowers a remote control toward the floor, trembling like an elderly hand weakened by age. A pair of white cowboy boots click their heels together, the sound sharp and rhythmic, echoing with the lively determination and faint uncertainty of an attentive novice in a line dance class.
Each motion carries visible traces of effort that resist the smoothness of automation. The gestures feel worn-in rather than perfected, shaped by time and repetition into something that resembles muscle memory more than programming. Jacob-Allard explains that the objects and their movements originate in her family’s extensive home-video archive. In the early 1990s, her family traded a car for an uncle’s video camera, and so began years of relentless documentation. The tapes captured domestic life in its most uneventful forms: a living room strewn with wrapping paper on Christmas morning, filmed for hours after the room had been vacated, the artist’s grandmother flicking from one television channel to the next, her hand moving in the same gesture over and over.
Years later, while digitizing this material, Jacob-Allard began to notice patterns embedded within the archive. Certain movements resurfaced repeatedly across generations like genetic traits, passed down through proximity and attention. She describes this process as a contamination of sorts, a term that resists hierarchical inheritance and instead suggests absorption through proximity. Within her work, the family functions as a porous system where influence moves in multiple directions simultaneously, where mothers pick up habits from their daughters just as much as the reverse.
This democratic lateral thinking is reflected in Jacob-Allard’s material choices too. Papier-mâché, associated with childhood classrooms and kitchen tables, evokes near-universal memories of early making and domestic labor. She is drawn to found materials: cardboard, newspapers, wood from the street. Working without molds and allowing edges to remain irregular, she pushes the medium toward realism while embracing materiality. There is a distinct domesticity and immediacy to these choices, alongside a pragmatic maternal tendency to resist waste—she insists on reading each newspaper before using it for papier-mâché, imbuing another layer of life into the surface.
The family itself emerges as the primary found material in Jacob-Allard’s work. While compiling home footage for a previous film project, ‘Les Immortelles,’ she studied countless clips of the hands of her relatives, matching gestures across the archive. She noticed that her mother had adopted certain movements only later in life, movements that her niece had performed years before. Bodies seemed to borrow from one another without regard for age or sequence.
As the conversation meanders, Jacob-Allard describes how her grandmother’s oft-repeated story of being carried away by a tornado as a young girl became another source material, a narrative she returned to obsessively over years of recorded conversations, shifting slightly with each retelling. Her grandmother’s age at the time of the incident got younger as she herself grew older, 14 becoming 13, then 12, then 11. As the artist relays this origin story on her late grandmother’s behalf, the cowboy boots click their heels again and this time, the image of Judy Garland’s Dorothy surfaces. Suddenly, the boots appear as a distant echo of her ruby slippers from ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ translated and mutated through different narrators, materials and contexts.
Jacob-Allard believes that her grandmother kept telling the tornado story in order to shape how she wished to be remembered, and when she died during the exhibition of a collaborative project they had made together, the artist found herself searching for ways to keep her alive. In her grief, she turned to vampire films and stories of immortality, drawn not only to their gothic allure but also to the broader human obsession with survival beyond death—from ancient myths and ritual cannibalism to contemporary transhumanism and Silicon Valley’s quest for eternal life.
In her work, vampirism becomes a poetic counter-narrative, a way of thinking about continuity through contagion rather than possession. Rejecting the pursuit of individual immortality, she imagines survival as an exchange of gestures, habits and stories across generations. Bloodlines are reclaimed as matrilineal, passed through mothers, daughters, grandmothers and nieces. Motherhood is explored as a transformative, irreversible threshold, likened to being bitten, after which the perception of the self gives way to the dawn of the collective. The discovery that this contamination works both ways, however, reminds us that the individual self has less disintegrated than it has revealed itself to have been a fiction all along. The grandmother’s gestures live on in the mother’s hands, which pass them to the daughter and onward, each transmission mutating rather than preserving, as memory becomes a living, viral form of survival. These vampiric ideas resonate with her domestic automata, where objects inherit and repeat movements recorded on tape. The sculptural works spring to life as uncanny hosts of the past, allowing them to persist in new, unexpected forms.
As I descend through the yolk-yellow stairwell with these ideas ringing in my ears, I’m struck by the paradox of the chicken and the egg. When it comes to family dynamics, how can we ever determine whose behavior influenced the other? Can we possibly distinguish the individual from the collective, the gesture learned from the one inherited? Following our conversation, I can’t imagine why we would want to. When it comes to finding inspiration, material and meaning in art, one thing is abundantly clear: for Myriam Jacob-Allard, there’s no place like home.
