Dear Shaded Viewers,
If you missed the hectic opening ceremony, we have another kind of event that can make you amazed by record breakers. It’s been five days that the French performer Abraham Poincheval has been living in a bottle in front of the Stade de France. You read well, a bottle. He’s in a giant plexiglass bottle with a cork but one that is a 100 times taller than the one on your table.
After travelling the Rhône in 2015, Poincheval decided to re-enact this performance for Plaine Commune, an artistic program joined with the Olympics in the town of Saint Denis (93). Two other institutions made the event possible cneai and ilotopia. The first is a company helping interdisciplinary projects come to life, the other is a theater company that makes shows on water.
Contrary to sports, Poincheval uses his body entirely but not with the violence you might expect. No blood, sweat or tears are here to shock you but with an unexpected approach : poetry. The spaces of his performances are always drawn and made with craftsmanship. The plinth of the bottle has two layers, one with a water system filtering the water of the canal for his daily life and rejecting you know what, the other with plants hydrated by this same filter. He upgraded the system with the local fine arts school… after having stocked the bottle for 2 years in his parents garden.
This stillness also becomes a total involvement in the body. Poincheval continues to live as if he was in a usual flat. However his days aren’t empty because he’s hearing the crowd cheering from the stadiums and visitors are telling him the latest sport results. Christian, his father, tells us that his performances makes him also wander into his mind. Being his first supporter, he is always amazed at the end of each of his performances, even after some that are at the edge of the darkest part of our imagination. One that moved him deeply was in 2017, where Abraham lived in a rock for a week at the Palais de Tokyo. This charming man in flower shirt entrusted us “It was like Christ going to his tumb”.
Don’t miss his exit this Saturday in Saint Denis (93) You also have all summer to see artworks that are the souvenirs of his previous work. The most striking is his Walk on clouds, displayed at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Tied to a hot air balloon, he plays harmonica unbothered in the clouds. Like in Baudelaire’s poem The stranger, you might find him odd but he knows where he goes on the road of his fantasy
https://www.instagram.com/fondationlv/reel/C8MtmwRoLkM/
Later,
Mael Heinz
