Yannick Jacquet's site-specific installation at Museo della Figurina in Modena

Yannick Jacquet (Geneva, 1980) has created a site-specific installation at the Museo della Figurina, part of the Fondazione di Art Visive di Modena (FMAV). The work dialogues with late 19th- and early 20th-century collectible cards through projections and video, forming a hybrid scenography that connects shadow theatre, non-verbal alphabets, pre-cinema, and contemporary social networks. Jacquet collaborated with visual artist and photographer Laeticia Bica, composer Laurent Delforge, and dancers Denis Inghelbrecht and Yamuna Kyamo Huygen. The installation explores the social value of gesture, the expressive capacity of hands, and their communicative power, inviting reflection on the relationship with the body in an era of virtual interactions. Jacquet juxtaposes gestures from different historical periods to build bridges and generate collisions. The handprint is one of the oldest graphic representations, demonstrating humanity's need to leave traces. Hands generate languages and reinforce verbal communication through movements that vary across cultures. For the exhibition, Jacquet immersed himself in the museum's archive of thousands of documents, focusing on 19th-century chromolithographic cards depicting children creating hand shadow games. These images reminded him of finger dance videos now viral on TikTok and YouTube, a phenomenon derived from breakdance that became popular among youth during COVID-19 isolation.