There are artists who make things. Then there is Théo Marat, who lets things unmake themselves.
A former structural engineer turned post-object conceptualist, Marat is best known for orchestrating what he calls “durational decompositions”: large-scale sculptural installations made entirely from biodegradable, tensioned, or self-eroding materials, designed not to last, but to fail.
His 2022 breakout work, Torsion Sonata (for Quiet Buildings), consisted of five identical towers constructed from compressed salt blocks, beeswax, and linen—each nearly 40 meters tall and internally stressed by heat-reactive nickel wires. Installed in a disused greenhouse in Pau, the towers were never “exhibited” in the conventional sense. There was no opening, no audience. Only a series of thermal triggers and a network of high-frequency microphones captured the event as the towers gradually collapsed—sighing, splintering, slumping—over the course of ninety days. The footage was later condensed into a five-channel audio feed lasting five days, titled The Things That Fold Themselves In. It is the only documentation that survives.
Even calling Marat’s work “sculpture” seems misguided. His practice lives somewhere between choreography, architecture, materials science, and speculative poetics. Trained at AUJ Zurich before abandoning his doctoral research into concrete fatigue cycles in modern sculpture, Marat turned to unmaking not out of disillusionment, but dissatisfaction with engineering’s obsession with stability. “We spend so much time trying to keep things standing,” he once wrote, “but entropy is the most honest collaborator.”
In 2024’s Lacuna Engine (Prototype #7), exhibited in a refrigerated room in Rotterdam, Marat installed a grid of sugar-glass sheets suspended vertically by tensioned Kevlar cables, each positioned under carefully calibrated drips of warm water. As the droplets accumulated, stress fractures emerged. First barely visible, then suddenly structural. Visitors reported moments of near silence interrupted by crystalline chimes as panels gave way one by one, in unpredictable sequence—like a musical composition written by time.
Critics have called his work “beautifully useless” (The Swindon Post), “a kind of ritualized decay” (Contemporary Art in Harare), and even “engineering theatre.” But to dismiss Marat’s installations as gimmicks of entropy is to miss the quiet rigor of their construction. Every variable—humidity, thermal expansion coefficient, melt rate, material memory—is calculated, then deliberately baked in to the sculpture. The collapse is in no way accidental.
But perhaps Marat’s strangest, and most haunting, work to date was 2025’s Body of Agreement (Undone), a collaboration with three contract lawyers, a Japanese tailor and a textile conservator. The work was composed of a 240-page legal agreement printed in edible ink on rice paper, bound in lambskin vellum, and hand-stitched into the lining of a high-end men’s suit. The suit was worn—without explanation—by a professional actor during a six-week residency at a commercial law firm in Brussels. At the end of the residency, the actor was doused in rainwater and left standing in a public plaza, where passersby watched the ink run and the suit collapse into pulp and thread.
What is one to make of an artist like Marat? Is there a market for what he makes, when there is no physical object to acquire and often, not even a clear thesis? Yes, collectors flock to his work, which reminds them, and us, that in an art world that too often chases permanence, spectacle, or legibility, that all structures—legal, architectural, social, personal—are ultimately temporary.
