Bécasse
Des murs avec des failles pour une paille/ La Santé Prison, Paris
What fires and stirs the woodcock in his springe or wakes the drowsy apricot betides?
(Monty Python, The Court Scene / Witness in Coffin)

In February 2025, Ola Vasiljeva installed an exhaust gate outside France’s most high-profile prison, La Santé, in Paris. For a period of two weeks, vapours from the prison’s underbelly were released into the open air outside the penitentiary wall—an exhale gesture drawn from Jean Genet’s "Un Chant d’Amour", where one prisoner’s cigarette smoke passes through a hole in the wall to the mouth of another. Vasiljeva extended that exhale in alignment with Genet’s refusal of moral judgment, which he considered too crude an instrument to hold the full psychic weight of what people carry. The gate was adorned with a silver light-torch marking this otherwise invisible transfer of spirit, memory and residue.

“Bécasse” takes its name from the French word for woodcock, but also from the slang term for a “goof”—a figure easily dismissed and underestimated. Vasiljeva adopted this persona, performing naïveté in order to approach the hard perimeters of La Santé. What followed was an accidental permission: a loophole granted by misrecognition. The institution perceived no threat and in that moment of being bécasse, the perimeter softened.

The intervention was never formalised as an installation. Its materials were misrecognition, atmospheric residue, release, institutional ventilation, and institutional softness in the face of absurdity. The question was not whether the gesture would be noticed, but how much could pass unnoticed or unguarded, through the gaps of serious systems.