Mattresses, sleeping bags, pieces of cardboard, unmade beds, broken stones, and truncated columns… What are these ruins—made of sand—that Théo Mercier unearthed beneath the ancient vaults of the Conciergerie? Are they ours? Those of our world “in crisis”—at war, bankrupt, on borrowed time…? Or those of another world? Of this Underworld referred to in the title of the trilogy, the third installment of which is housed in the former Conciergerie prison, The Sleeping Chapter “Both,” replied the visual artist and set designer who, for weeks, along with 17 assistants, sculpted this ghostly and 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 theatre of misery that is in our cities and in our rooms… ».
A deserted landscape, reminiscent of some abandoned shelter, an immense makeshift dormitory where only the unmade beds bear the imprint of human life, of human passage, this Otherworld, as if latent, flickering in its sandy matrix, is nonetheless populated by dogs. Petrified as well, but endowed with eyes carved from obsidian, they possess a strange presence despite their sandy bodies. Inspired by the recumbent effigies of kings and great 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, "with eyes wide open to the black night."
Another guide, not sculpted but staged this time, by Théo Mercier: the child, the one he calls "the child of time", whom he makes wander among the ruins during the performances giving life to his landscape: 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 of migrants and beggars, healing wounds and filling gaps, a doctor of bodies and souls…
Like a mirage about to vanish into the unstable sands, the evanescent landscape sculpted by Théo Mercier thus becomes a crossing, a crossing of time and void, saying, through the fragility and instability of a material and forms, destined to disappear, to which he has given form, the salutary precariousness of existence: "material of metamorphosis, of mutation par excellence", malleable matter opening up the whole field of possibilities, sand is the soil of dreams… And here we enter his cathedral.
A sublime and moving journey out of time.
Théo Mercier, OUTREMONDE, The Sleeping Chapter – Conciergerie de Paris
2, Boulevard du Palais, Paris 1er
Until January 8, 2023
Series of performances presented from December 3 to 11 within the exhibition produced as part of the New Settings program of the Hermès Corporate Foundation.
Stéphanie Dulout
