Mattresses, sleeping luggage, items of cardboard, dismantled beds, broken stones, and truncated columns… What are these ruins, of sand, that Théo Mercier has delivered to mild beneath the centuries-old vaults of the Conciergerie? Are they ours? These of our world “in crisis” – at warfare, bankrupt, on borrowed time…? Or these of another world? Of this Outworld designated in the title of the trilogy of which the former prison of the Conciergerie hosts the third part, The Sleeping Chapter? Both, answered the visual artist-scenographer who, for weeks, with seventeen assistants, sculpted in situ this ghostly and ephemeral city: “These are the ruins of our particular person and collective goals, our broken goals, our wounded goals, the ruins of love tales… the theater of misery that's in our cities and in our rooms…”
Abandoned landscape, evoking some deserted shelter, an immense makeshift dormitory where solely the damaged beds bear the imprint of human life, of the passage of man, this Outworld as if latent, flickering in its sandy gangue, is nevertheless populated by canine. Petrified too, however with eyes minimize out of obsidian, they have a wierd presence despite their sandy bodies. Impressed by the recumbents of kings and great lords accompanied by their canine for eternity of their tomb-mausoleums, “they are the guardians of sleep, the guardians of our nights and our insomnia” and, like the canine of the passage of Egyptian mythology, lead us on the path of eternity and information us in our wandering, along our earthly journey, “eyes vast open on the darkish night time.”
Another information, not sculpted but staged, by Théo Mercier: the child, the one he calls “the kid of occasions.” that he makes wander in the midst of the ruins through the performances, giving life to his panorama: crossing the nights with out ever closing his eyes, he's, just like the dog, our information, but in addition our breather and comforter, a sort of guardian angel of the migrants and the beggars, therapeutic the injuries and filling the gaps, physician of the bodies and souls…
Like a mirage ready to fade within the unstable sands, the evanescent landscape sculpted by Théo Mercier turns into a crossing, a crossing of time and vacancy, saying, by means of the fragility and instability of a cloth and varieties, doomed to vanish, to which he has given type, the salutary precariousness of existence: “materials of the metamorphosis, of the mutation par excellence,” malleable matter opening all the sector of the attainable ones, the sand is the bottom of the goals… And we enter right here in his cathedral.
A chic and overwhelming journey out of time.
Till January eighth
At La Conciergerie de Paris – 2, bd du Palais, Ier – www.festival-automne.com
A collection of performances introduced from December 3 to 11 in the context of the New Settings program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.&
Stéphanie Dulout
L’article THÉO MERCIER : OUTREMONDE, THE SLEEPING CHAPTER est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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