12.12.2025 – 13.02.2025 | Fabienne Francotte

We Don’t Need to Talk begins in a quiet space where words feel unnecessary and emotion moves ahead of language. The exhibition lingers in this terrain of the unspoken, inviting viewers into a form of communication that depends on presence rather than speech.

Belgium-born and currently based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Fabienne Francotte works from the places where stories hide in the body. Her practice draws from encounters marked by trauma, displacement, tenderness, and resilience. She notices small things: the shift of breath, the weight of hesitation, the emotional traces that linger on the surface of a person. These observations travel into her materials. Drawing merges with gestural writing. Paper, thread, clay, and other tactile mediums become carriers of memory and emotional residue.

Her calligraphic training can be felt in the deliberate rhythm of her lines. Each mark holds the repetition of ritual and the vulnerability of a hand that allows both steadiness and tremor. Smudges, scratches, and unexpected gestures create a vocabulary that prioritises feeling over representation.

Portraits and figures in her work reveal interior states rather than likeness. They emerge from people she meets and the layers they hold: cultural, psychological, and deeply personal. Even the act of stitching through paper becomes a symbolic gesture, a quiet way of acknowledging what is wounded yet enduring.

The exhibition leaves space for viewers to sense their own inner terrains. It encourages a wordless recognition, a moment of standing in front of a work and finding something familiar in its quiet. These pieces do not offer resolution. They offer presence.

In Fabienne’s words, loneliness is not absence but presence, and silence is not empty but filled with stories just out of reach. Her practice rests in this delicate balance. It reveals what we cannot always say, and it trusts the viewer to meet it halfway. In this exhibition, this encounter can unfold without pressure or explanation.

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