Dear Shaded Viewers,
Laure Prouvost’s Nous, frissons d’étoiles turns the nave of the Grand Palais into a fully sensorial fiction, less an exhibition than a quantum weather system you step inside. Beneath the glass roof, a monumental assemblage of video, sound, sculpture, scent and light pulls you away from the polite distance of the white cube and into a world where perception is constantly slipping, doubling, misfiring. At the centre, a kinetic core and enveloping film environment stretch her long-standing interests—broken language, mistranslation, bodily disorientation—onto an emphatically cosmic scale.
Crucially, this is not just another “immersive” spectacle. Prouvost works with quantum physics not as a didactic theme but as a metaphor for how we might feel our way through an unstable reality. Suspended “Cute Bits,” qubit-meteorites hovering under the glass, brush against visitors and, when worn, whisper and scent the experience, making entanglement oddly intimate. Sandbanks, platforms and cushions invite you to lie down and let the video wash over you; time in the show stretches, folds, loops.
If the Grand Palais has historically staged spectacles of power and progress, Prouvost answers with a poetics of fragility, probability and shared dizziness. Nous, frissons d’étoiles is at its best when it abandons narrative entirely and simply lets you tremble, momentarily, with the stars.
Later,
Diane
