Passé Présent Futur documents a residency programme in which four artists — Jenna Kaës, Mounir Ayache, Salomé Chatriot and Jacopo Pagin — were invited by curator Emmanuelle Luciani into the production ateliers of Hermès. The book follows what happened when those artists engaged with the savoir-faire of Hermès artisans working in silk, leather, crystal and metal, and the new work that emerged from that encounter.
Luciani, who founded the Marseille-based Southway Studio, has built a curatorial identity around what she calls “time bubbles”: situations in which historical and contemporary forms are collapsed together. That instinct shapes the residency programme and the book. Marcelo Gomes was commissioned to make a new photographic series following each artist at work; his images are sensuous and textural, and they mirror the tactility of process. Tadzio, a long-standing partner of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, contributes further photographs attentive to craft and material. The credited photographic contributors are Gomes and Tadzio.
Interviews with the artists and with the artisans who supported them run alongside the images, and Olivier Zahm contributes text. The book is bilingual in English and French, and its material form is deliberately unconventional: the section-sewn softcover is die-cut with holes and issued in four jacket variations. With 228 pages and 100 colour plates, it is conceived as an experimental book object rather than a conventional exhibition catalogue.
For collectors, the significance lies in the intersection: a major luxury house’s foundation, an independent curator with a strong authorial position, a publisher known for treating the book as a designed object, and photographers commissioned specifically for the project. Published by Loose Joints with the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in November 2025, that combination, together with the four jacket states and the die-cut binding, makes this a considered acquisition for readers interested in the relationship between craft, patronage and contemporary photography.
