Down the Hole: Tohé Commaret Turns a Bristol Gallery Into a Waiting Room Between Two Lives

In “Mijitas,” the Franco-Chilean filmmaker splits her audience between a haunted hotel and a telenovela gone quiet, with an Andean underworld myth buried in between

recall

• Two Screens, One Hole
• Rosa: A Hotel That Doesn’t Need Cleaning
• Can You Hear Me?: Telenovela as Trojan Horse
• El Tío and the Myth in the Middle
• Working With Family, Filming Like Automatic Writing
• Why Mijitas, Why Now

Walk into Spike Island’s main gallery this summer and the first thing you register isn’t a screen — it’s an absence. French-Chilean filmmaker [Tohé Commaret]’s exhibition “Mijitas,” her first UK solo presentation, opens with a cavity cut into the center of the space: a looping video of an impossibly long corridor, standing in for a hole the artist couldn’t physically dig into the gallery floor. For a stretch after entering, it’s the only thing moving. Visitors are plunged into near-darkness around it, held in a kind of waiting room before the two films on either side of the room begin.

Those films, Rosa and Can you hear me?, both new for 2026, face each other across the gallery — one commissioned originally for MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST in Frankfurt, the other conceived specifically for Spike Island’s architecture. Commaret has described wanting the two works to function like parallel lives lived by the same woman: the same lead actress appears in both, playing a cleaning worker on one side and, across the room, a sex worker on the other. Neither role overlaps with the other in plot, but both are, in Commaret’s words, forms of working women’s labor, and both films end the same way — in a quiet, undramatic act of violence.

It’s a structurally unusual way to build an exhibition, treating two freestanding short films less as separate objects than as two possible outcomes of a single life, staged in a room shaped explicitly to disorient the viewer’s sense of which reality is “real.” The hole in the middle isn’t a curatorial flourish so much as the thesis of the show made literal: something is buried in the space between these two women, and the exhibition asks you to sit with not knowing quite what.

The corridor looping inside that central cavity isn’t a one-off device built for Bristol; it recurs across nearly all of Commaret’s films as a kind of connective tissue, a passageway where very little happens and time seems to stall out entirely. Placing it at the literal center of “Mijitas,” rather than embedding it inside either film, effectively turns a recurring formal motif into the exhibition’s architecture. Visitors don’t just watch Commaret’s corridor motif on screen; for a moment, before either film starts, they’re required to stand inside it.

stir

Rosa, the 18-minute film realized as part of the PONTOPREIS MMK 2026 and commissioned in collaboration with MMK curator Susanne Pfeffer, centers on a group of cleaning women who discover a lost notebook inside an unusually spotless hotel — a space Commaret describes as simultaneously paradisiacal and liminal, so pristine it barely seems to require cleaning at all, closer to a mental landscape than a functioning building. As the women read through the notebook, they piece together that its owner, a young woman caught in a destructive romantic entanglement, needs help extracting herself from her own story. Gradually it becomes unclear whether the cleaners are simply cleaners at all: they behave more like guardian spirits, observing the young woman from just outside her awareness, nudging her fate through what Commaret calls a kind of thought-based intervention rather than direct contact. Whether they’re her ancestors or unrelated watchers is left open. By the film’s end, freed from whatever was holding her back, the young woman commits a murder.

The cast is drawn almost entirely from Commaret’s own family: the cleaning women in Rosa are played by her aunts, all of whom have worked as cleaners in real life, a casting choice that collapses the distance between performance and lived experience that runs through much of her filmography. The film unfolds in multiple languages simultaneously — the aunts speak Spanish, while the young protagonist drifts between Persian and French depending on the scene — a choice Commaret has framed as evidence that the connection between these women operates on a register beneath spoken language, something closer to a shared spiritual frequency than literal communication. Much of the film was also shot in Vitry-sur-Seine, the working-class Paris suburb where Commaret grew up and where a large share of her work continues to return, treating the town less as a backdrop than as a recurring character in its own right.

Rosa also carries a formal echo of an earlier Commaret installation at MMK, where she lined the gallery ceiling with small monitors showing footage shot on her phone — a butterfly landing on her shoe, a chance encounter with one of her own actors on a familiar street — framed around a Jean-Luc Godard idea that cinema is something watched with the head tilted upward. At Spike Island, Commaret deliberately inverted that gesture: rather than directing the audience’s gaze up toward a constellation of small screens, she built the show around the downward pull of the central hole, trading Godard’s skyward cinema for something closer to a descent.

flow

If Rosa unfolds with dreamlike patience, Can you hear me? — the shorter of the two new films, running just under eight minutes — moves at telenovela speed on purpose. Shot on a VHS camera on what Commaret describes as a shoestring budget, with her closest friends both acting in and producing the piece, the film follows three dominatrices and leans hard into soap-opera convention: quick cuts, exaggerated plotting, jokes that land as deliberately flat rather than genuinely funny. It’s a structure Commaret has used before to smuggle in more serious material under the cover of familiar, disposable-feeling entertainment; the telenovela format, for all its predictability, still manages to say something real about how audiences relate to love, longing, and the stories that drive them.

The film’s real pivot happens when its pace collapses entirely. Partway through, the central character begins to pray, and the frantic telenovela rhythm that’s been pulling the viewer forward simply stops. What follows is a much slower passage in which the character reflects on trying to recover a lost sense of wonder — a tonal rupture that turns the film’s genre trappings inside out. As with Rosa, the story ends in a killing, but one staged with almost no commotion: both of the murders that close out “Mijitas” happen in near-total silence, a choice Commaret has connected to a broader interest in what entertainment even means today, in a moment when a film that withholds spectacle can feel almost disappointing by design.

Pairing Can you hear me? directly opposite Rosa inside the same room reframes both films. On their own, the two works read as tonally distinct experiments — one slow and reflective, the other fast and deliberately campy. Placed facing each other, with the same actress present in both, the differences start to look less like contrast for its own sake and more like two coping strategies available to the same woman: retreat inward into a corridor and a notebook, or push outward into performance, spectacle, and control over how she’s seen. Neither strategy resolves cleanly, and both end in the same act, which is precisely the point Commaret seems to be making about the narrowness of the outcomes available to women whose labor, whatever form it takes, is fundamentally about being watched.

myth and

The exhibition’s title comes from “mi hijita,” a Latin American Spanish term of endearment loosely translated as “my little girl,” typically used by an older generation toward a younger one — a phrase capable of carrying real tenderness in one context and a faint undertone of condescension in another. Commaret has built the show to sit inside that ambiguity, foregrounding solidarity between women while keeping the underlying dynamics of power and control visible rather than resolved.

The hole at the center of the gallery draws on research Commaret has been doing for several years into Andean mythology from northern Chile, material she’s developing toward a feature film. Central to that research is El Tío, a guardian spirit of the underground world associated with mining regions — a figure born from the collision between Indigenous Andean belief systems and colonial Christianity. Some accounts describe colonial authorities deliberately recasting older mountain spirits as a menacing figure meant to keep miners disciplined and afraid; instead, miners adopted El Tío as a protector, offering him prayers and turning what had been designed as a tool of control into a source of resistance. Commaret has cited that inversion — a symbol of domination reclaimed as a symbol of protection — as the emotional key to the hole itself: a space that’s frightening to look into, but also one you can address, confide in, and potentially draw strength from.

flow

Across her filmography, Commaret has developed a consistent method built around nonprofessional actors, most of them friends or family members playing roles adjacent to their real lives — the aunts-as-cleaners in Rosa are a direct extension of a practice she’s used since earlier films made around Vitry-sur-Seine. She’s described her filmmaking process as resembling automatic writing: ideas arrive and she follows them with minimal deliberation, rarely giving concepts time to develop before shooting. That instinct-driven approach extends to her interest in what she calls the paranoia of the sensitive artist — the sense that ordinary details, a butterfly, a chance encounter, a familiar hallway, are addressing you directly, material an artist instinctively converts into narrative.

That same instinct shapes how Commaret talks about femininity in her work more broadly. Rather than defaulting to stories of romantic obsession, which she notes dominate most commercial filmmaking, she’s drawn to depicting rejection and the desire to reclaim control as equally central experiences. She’s also cited Haruki Murakami’s image of a tree — its branches, its leaves, the veins running through each leaf — as a metaphor for the lives a person never gets to live, an idea that maps directly onto Mijitas’s structure of two women, two fates, one shared undercurrent.

fin

Born in 1992 in Vitry-sur-Seine and trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Le Fresnoy, Commaret has built a fast-moving body of work over the past several years, screening at Berlinale Shorts twice, at the Louvre, Palais de Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at La Biennale de Lyon, alongside solo presentations including “Mala Onda” at ZOLLAMT MMK in Frankfurt and a placement in the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award at Kunstmuseum Bonn, both earlier this year. She’s also picked up the PONTOPREIS MMK and the Grand prix essais art vidéo at Cannes’s Côté Court Festival across multiple editions, alongside recognition at Cinema Jove and FNC Montreal.

“Mijitas” arrives at Spike Island as part of a co-commission with MMK, produced by Paris-based Parcelles Films and supported by Fluxus Art Projects, and runs alongside Nancy Lupo’s concurrent solo show “Several Chickens Later” through 6 September. Positioned together, the two exhibitions extend an ongoing thread in Spike Island’s programming toward artists working through domestic and feminized labor from oblique, genre-inflected angles — Lupo through sculpture rooted in material culture and aspiration, Commaret through moving image built from the conventions of hotel-mystery and telenovela alike. What distinguishes Commaret’s contribution is how little distance she puts between herself and her material: the cleaning women on screen are literally her aunts, the town on screen is literally the one she grew up in, and the myth structuring the room’s central void is one she’s still actively researching for work still to come.

That last point matters more than it might first appear. Commaret has described the Andean mythology feeding into “Mijitas” as research she’s carrying toward a feature film still in development, which means the hole at Spike Island functions less as a finished symbol than as a working sketch — a first public airing of an idea she expects to keep building on. Visitors encountering the show this summer aren’t just seeing two completed short films dressed up with a conceptual frame; they’re getting an early look at the raw material for a larger project still taking shape, filtered through a gallery space that happens to give it its most literal possible form. “Mijitas” reads less like a finished statement than a way station — a hole dug partway, with more beneath it still to surface.