Mattresses, sleeping bags, pieces of cardboard, dismantled beds, broken stones and truncated columns... What are these ruins - of sand - that Théo Mercier has unearthed beneath the centuries-old vaults of the Conciergerie? Are they ours? Those of our world "in crisis" - at war, bankrupt, on borrowed time...? Or those of another world? From that Outremonde referred to in the title of the trilogy whose third installment, The Sleeping Chapter, takes place in the former Conciergerie prison? Both, replied the visual artist-scenographer, who spent weeks with 17 assistants sculpting this ghostly, ephemeral city in situ: " These are the ruins of our individual and collective dreams, our broken dreams, our wounded dreams, the ruins of love stories... the theater of misery that is in our cities and in our rooms...".
A deserted landscape, reminiscent of some abandoned shelter, an immense makeshift dormitory whose unmade beds alone bear the imprint of human life, of man's passage, this Outworld, as if latent, flickering in its sandy gangue, is nonetheless populated by dogs. Petrified too, but with obsidian eyes, they have a strange presence despite their sandy bodies. Inspired by the recumbent figures of kings and lords accompanied by their dogs for eternity in their tomb-mausoleums, "they are the guardians of sleep, the guardians of our nights and our insomnia" and, like the dog of the passage in Egyptian mythology, lead us on the path to eternity and guide us in our wanderings, along our earthly journey, "eyes wide open on the dark night".
Another guide, not sculpted but staged, by Théo Mercier: the child, whom he calls "the child of the times", and who wanders among the ruins during the performances that bring his landscape to life: crossing the nights without ever closing his eyes, he is, like the dog, our guide, but also our healer and comforter, a kind of guardian angel for migrants and beggars, healing wounds and filling gaps, doctor of bodies and souls...
Like a mirage ready to vanish in the unstable sands, the evanescent landscape sculpted by Théo Mercier becomes a crossing, a crossing of time and emptiness, expressing the salutary precariousness of existence through the fragility and instability of a material and the forms, doomed to disappear, to which it has given form: Sand is "the material of metamorphosis, of mutation par excellence", a malleable material opening up the whole field of possibilities, the breeding ground of dreams... And here we enter his cathedral.
A sublime, moving journey out of time.
Théo Mercier, OUTREMONDE, The Sleeping Chapter - Conciergerie de Paris
2, boulevard du Palais, Paris1er
Until January 8, 2023
A series of performances presented from December 3 to 11 as part of the New Settings program organized by the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès.
Stéphanie Dulout
