Pile Plate is a glasswork collection created at CIRVA, delving into the intertwined stories of rum, creolization, and ghostly presences. At the center is the "Pile Plate"—a flask first produced in 1988, with a 49% alcohol content and sold cheaply all around La Réunion. Rum, distilled from sugarcane plantations that drove enslavement, land exploitation, and environmental degradation, became a colonial tool of violence, used to break body and spirit alike. This flask embodies the lingering legacy of plantation society, a morbid presence that persists today through the island’s high rates of alcoholism.

Yet, rum became central to Afro-Malagasy magic rituals, as La Réunion's enslaved ancestors, who resisted the confines of the plantation, turned the spirit into a symbol of resilience. Through magic rituals, popular practices & reclaimed ceremonies people of La Réunion redefined rum as a vessel for ancestral remembrance.

In Pile Plate, Yassine Ben Abdallah has designed 98 glass-blown flasks, exhausting the form of the Pile Plate to reveal its layered ambivalence. The collection culminates in a final vase, presented as a ghostly container of violence, memory, and spiritual narrative.

_{In-residence project at CIRVA (Centre international de recherche sur le verre et les arts plastiques)}‍
_{Handcrafted by Alexandre Mouillet, Cyrille Rocherieux, Fernando Torre, David Veis, Lucie de Bodinat & Thomas Paynel.
Photos by Camille Lemonnier & Luc Bertrand}

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