In The Origin, Mona von Wittlage distills the human body to its most essential form: the torso, the womb, the point of emergence. Painted in blood across a vast grid of sanitary bags, the figure is at once universal and intimate, a symbol of creation that is also fragile, perishable, and bound to time.

The stark red lines echo primal markings, as if carved directly from the body itself, while the repeated inscriptions on the bags — “Ne pas jeter dans les W.C.”— become a litany of refusal, an attempt to regulate what is elemental and uncontainable.

Here, blood is no longer only matter but memory, inscription, and origin story. The work opens a space between reverence and discomfort, reminding us that every beginning is rooted in vulnerability, every act of creation inseparable from its eventual fading.

The Origin stands as both testimony and threshold: a reminder that our mortality is not an end but the very condition of life’s renewal.