Exuviae is the first major exhibition devoted to the work of French artist, anthropologist, and filmmaker Verena Paravel. Drawn from her overarching research project entitled Cosmofonia, the exhibition explores the planet’s inaudible sounds and voices: infrasonic vibrations, interspecies acoustic exchange, and audible traces of ecological transformation and survival.

These vibrational registers lie beyond human hearing and remain largely unknown to science. Paravel approaches them through experimental sound recording and unconventional image-making, a way of “seeing with the ears.” Paravel’s latest film work, Strata (2026), sits at the core of the exhibition. In it, she reveals the unheard and unseen life in and around Stromboli, off the coast of Sicily, one of the most active volcanoes on Earth.

This monumental video projection and sonic environment proposes a unique cinematic form that is attentive to animals, plants, and ecosystems, displacing the human as the center of perception. In an adjacent installation, a taxidermied peacock audibly reveals, in real time, the larvae feeding on it.

An exuvia is that which a body leaves behind when it moults: an empty envelope that maintains the exact shape of what lived inside it. The word comes from the Latin exuere, meaning to shed. It names a condition rather than an event, a life made of moultings. In French, the word for moulting, mue, also refers to the breaking of a voice, and the exhibition Exuviae is, throughout, an experience of voices and listening.
Verena Paravel (born 1971 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland) lives and works in Paris. 

Curated by Fatima Hellberg, Lukas Flygare and Naoko Kaltschmidt

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