The exhibition “Lettres du quotidien – Extraits, d.buts, jeux, traces” offers visitors the opportunity to discover the work of artists Malak El Zanaty Varichon and her daughter Mona Varichon. Their practices are nourished by conversations and shared experiences of family and everyday life. The exhibition brings together a large body of work created by the two artists at different stages of their lives, between 1996 and 2025. Painted postcards and letters , collages composed of bits of children’s drawings, photographs of their living and working spaces, vlogs of everyday life and current events… creating is a way of discovering the world while shaping it, without hierarchy between child and adult and without any expectation of recognition.

An art workshop leader since the early 1990s, Malak has worked mostly at the Atelier des Enfants at the Centre Pompidou, as well as in schools and healthcare institutions in and around Paris. Both in her workshops and with her own children, cultural mediation and sharing creativity on a daily basis feed her own relationship with art and her way of being an artist. Malak talks about “accompanying the desire to make, and making together ” in an approach that is playful and joyful. For more than forty years, in parallel with her work and family life, she has been creating collages, photographs, paintings and assemblages. For her part, Mona has been working for several years to gain recognition for her mother’s work in the contemporary art world. Through studio visits, artists, gallery owners and exhibition curators close to Mona began discovering Malak’s art folders filled with years of work. This led to invitations to exhibit from artists such as Louise Sartor, Asha Schechter, Cory Scozzari and Ethan Assouline, who were enthusiastic about both her career path and her formal creations. With this exhibition at CAC Br.tigny, Malak will
present her work in a French public institution for the first time.

While she was studying art in America, Mona worked as an archivist for contemporary artists such as Laura Owens and Diana Thater. Working with them, she learnt the importance of documenting and archiving traces of both their practices and their epoch. She decided to apply this method to both her mother’s work and her own production. When they were living far apart and in regular contact, Mona also began recording their telephone conversations, which would later become material for her first films. In parallel, her photographs document daily life, in which Malak plays a major role: at home, in the workplace, at the market. She also looks at cities and their language, particularly through her series of photos of advertisements. Malak and Mona blur the boundaries ordinarily drawn between amateur and professional practice, between private and urban space, between the art world and their free interpretation of it. This singular and disparate ensemble produces a perpetual exchange between the two women and the world, enabling the connection of life with what already belongs to yesterday, or what will happen in the future. Emotion nestles itself into these works when they capture this shared time that is already slipping away from them.