Candies instead of crystals, lollipops where gilded frames would be, sweets suspended like ancient Murano chandeliers. In the halls of Palazzo Contarini Polignac in Venice, Dutch artist Simone Post has built a domestic world made of sugar destined to melt. The installation, titled She Knew She/It/They Would Melt and presented at the 61st Venice Biennale as part of the collateral exhibition Still Joy – From Ukraine into the World, is not a decorative gimmick: it is the convergence point of years of research into memory, the fragility of matter, and joy as an act of survival.

Post has built her practice around a principle that, before designing anything, requires her to listen to the material. Having grown up in a house full of sewing machines, she developed from an early age a visceral relationship with textiles, yarns, and tactile surfaces. This bond then became a method: every project begins with her hands in the material, folding it, tearing it, rolling, combining, searching for what it wants to become.

Through soft cabinets, pleated ceramics, twisted windows, chairs reupholstered with unexpected materials, Post has for years been building environments in which the everyday becomes alien and the alien strangely familiar — objects caught in a state of transformation, neither solid nor liquid, suspended between what they were and what they are about to become. Color is always structural, never decorative: her surfaces breathe intense tones and bold combinations that seem to assert something urgent, while beneath that luminosity a more serious question always hides — about time, about loss, about the resilience of things. Co-founder of the collective Envisions — whose motto is “everything but the end product” — she has made the process itself an exhibitable value, bringing samples, prototypes, and offcuts to shows instead of finished objects. It is this same ethos that makes the candy chandeliers in Venice so precise: they shine, they enchant, and all the while they melt.