• exhibition, meeting

open house 2026: roots & routes, residency I

With : Zahra Malek, Roxane Guillot, Lindsay Bennett Ford, Laurel Forster, James McLoughlin and Krishna Bhat
Date : 31st October 2026

This late October, Maison Saint-Joseph wakes up: across its old walls, its shadows shift, the vines slumped over its façade stretch out, and its frenzies bristle. The house stretches and catches its breath for the end of a day that welcomes you on the offbeat of creation.

Not perfection, but raw, unfinished work, still in its beautiful mess. Our resident artists and writers share their works in progress, still being patched together: unfinished, full of passages that ring false, and of words that perhaps should never be corrected. Novels, poems, photographs and an immersive installation answer one another, and each work finds its own echo in sound.

Coming from Iran, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, India and France, together they weave a collective narrative: of the roots we carry with us, and the routes that found their way to us.

resident artists and writers:

Curated by Éléonore D’Hauterives
portrait de Zahra Malek

zahra malek

Visual artist
Zahra Malek (Iran, London) spends her residency collecting the invisible stories and secret paths of the land. Through the fragmented reflection she returns, she invites visitors to rediscover the place they call home.
portrait de Roxane Guillot

roxane guillot

Poet and photographer
Roxane Guillot (Switzerland, Crépy-en-Valois) spent years photographing time itself, through the world of fine watchmaking. Now returning to writing, her first language, she is composing a debut collection in which poems and photographs answer one another. Here, routes are the ones we do not choose: events that simply arrive, as if mapped out in advance, until they burn.
portrait de Lindsay Bennett Ford

lindsay bennett ford

Novelist
Lindsay Bennett Ford (United Kingdom, Kent) recently returned from years on a Greek island, the setting of Kampylos: one volatile summer in which an Englishwoman’s chosen home, her marriage and her secrets begin to unravel.
portrait de Laurel Forster

laurel forster

Novelist

Laurel Forster (United Kingdom, Winchester), Associate Professor of Cultural History, writes about women’s lives across the twentieth century. Tiller Twins follows two sisters, dancers in a Tiller Girl troupe, from London’s theatreland to occupied Paris, drawing on the stories her grandmother was reluctant to tell.

portrait de James McLoughlin

james mcloughlin

Novelist and screenwriter
James McLoughlin (United Kingdom, London) is a screenwriter with a feature script in development with the BFI. Sixpenny, his literary thriller, is set in an English village in 1964: three murders, two missing persons, and a friendship tested by what a family, and a nation, choose to remember.
portrait de Krishna Bhat

krishna bhat

Sound artist
Krishna Bhat (India, London) weaves a soundscape in which each work finds its own echo, tracing its own routes through the house.

Saturday 31st October 2026 from 6pm to 9pm

Maison Saint Joseph
13 rue Alphonse Cardin,
60800 Crépy-en-Valois

(12-minute walk from the station, 40 mins train from Paris Gare du Nord)

Start: 6pm

Performances, readings and conversations over a drink

End: 9pm

Free entry, booking required.

Curation: Éléonore d’Hauterives (France)
Sound composition: Krishna Bhat (India)

get a ticket