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Collectif Je t'aime, a group of eight artists who completed their BFA's at ECAL in Lausanne in 2024, collaborate less as a brand than as a reason to stay together. Their sculpture, If the collective was a tattoo, how many laser sessions would it take to erase it? (2025) squats in the space like a leather-skinned arachnid on turned wooden legs with two embedded screens. The artist's eight sweaty faces take it in turns to answer questions on the first screen that tumble out of the second, all to that recognisable buzzing and clicking sound of a tattoo machine.

"How do you define an artist's success?", "What will be the end of the collective? Should we set one, like Art Club 2000 did?", "Did ECAL make you a good artist?", "What's your favourite way to forget?", "Which work by another member of the collective would you have liked to make?". Each question stencil transferred to the artists skin, all but ready to be tattooed. The out of sync answers are sometimes funny, yet sometimes painfully familiar.

This close-up of Collectif Je t'aime is messy, intense and alive. Just like friendship itself!