The French Pavilion
At the Venice Biennial, Boursier-Mougenot represents France with a spellbinding presentation in the Giardini that has received too little notice in the press. Organized by curator Emma Lavigne, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the work echoes at once with the mythical and with a strain of modern science.
A large Scotch pine tree dominates the central room of the neoclassical French pavilion. It rests atop a hulking ball of dirt and roots, and, equipped with motors, it moves idly around the room, its movements resulting from a reading of electrical signals in the plants. A gentle electronic hum sounds in the space, its frequencies derived from the same signals. Two similar trees occupy the grounds, harmonizing with those that line the walkways between the national pavilions.
Boursier-Mougenot has a weakness for overly clever titles. Admittedly, maybe something is lost in translation, but this project is called rêvolutions, which combines the French word for dream, rêve, with révolutions to suggest, clunkily to my ear, a dream-revolution. (He dubbed from here to ear a work that turns an exhibition space into an aviary, as a flock of colorful finches perch on the amplified electric guitars and basses displayed so that their necks are horizontal, like tree branches.)
The artist had the glass removed from the pavilion’s skylights, rendering the interior open to the elements. When I arrived last weekend, it was just after a downpour, and the sun had re-emerged, so that the tree shimmered with the light on the rainwater as a few attendants mopped the floor.
The trees’ transformation recalls in reverse the myth of Apollo and Daphne. When the nymph Daphne appeals to her father, a god, to protect her from Apollo’s amorous advances, he turns her into a laurel tree. Lavigne further cites Francesco Colonna novel The Dream of Poliphilus and Primo Levi’s short story Dysphylaxis as literary parallels for the metamorphosis of trees. And for the artist, the trees’ movement in the space between the national pavilions symbolizes people’s free travel among countries, and has resonance with the movement of refugees.
(Artnet.com)
The French Pavilion
At the Venice Biennial, Boursier-Mougenot represents France with a spellbinding presentation in the Giardini that has received too little notice in the press. Organized by curator Emma Lavigne, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the work echoes at once with the mythical and with a strain of modern science.
A large Scotch pine tree dominates the central room of the neoclassical French pavilion. It rests atop a hulking ball of dirt and roots, and, equipped with motors, it moves idly around the room, its movements resulting from a reading of electrical signals in the plants. A gentle electronic hum sounds in the space, its frequencies derived from the same signals. Two similar trees occupy the grounds, harmonizing with those that line the walkways between the national pavilions.
Boursier-Mougenot has a weakness for overly clever titles. Admittedly, maybe something is lost in translation, but this project is called rêvolutions, which combines the French word for dream, rêve, with révolutions to suggest, clunkily to my ear, a dream-revolution. (He dubbed from here to ear a work that turns an exhibition space into an aviary, as a flock of colorful finches perch on the amplified electric guitars and basses displayed so that their necks are horizontal, like tree branches.)
The artist had the glass removed from the pavilion’s skylights, rendering the interior open to the elements. When I arrived last weekend, it was just after a downpour, and the sun had re-emerged, so that the tree shimmered with the light on the rainwater as a few attendants mopped the floor.
The trees’ transformation recalls in reverse the myth of Apollo and Daphne. When the nymph Daphne appeals to her father, a god, to protect her from Apollo’s amorous advances, he turns her into a laurel tree. Lavigne further cites Francesco Colonna novel The Dream of Poliphilus and Primo Levi’s short story Dysphylaxis as literary parallels for the metamorphosis of trees. And for the artist, the trees’ movement in the space between the national pavilions symbolizes people’s free travel among countries, and has resonance with the movement of refugees.
(Artnet.com)