ART CITIES:Paris-Lasco Project 2016 at Palais de Tokyo
In 2012, the Palais de Tokyo initiated the “Lasco Project” , to showcase artistic projects setting the street within artistic history in its building’s subterranean passages. Since December 2012, nearly 60 artists have participated, from Futura 2000 to Cleon Peterson, Dran, Skki, Evol, Vhils, Azyle, Antwan Horfée and Ken Sortais.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Palais de Tokyo Archive
All of these secret interventions which can be inaccessible, invisible or monumental, square up to the Palais de Tokyo’s plain architecture and stand as one of the strangest urban art projects in a cultural centre. When put in relation one with the other, these interventions show that the institution is a wasteland where the imaginary can run against the current. For its sixth season, the Lasco Project invited artists to make something new once again of the spaces in the Palais de Tokyo. At the Palais de Tokyo, for “- + | = +”, his first large-scale project in an institution, Philippe Baudelocque is refurbishing a monumental staircase where he is weaving connections between different series, plunging the spectators profoundly into his atomic trajectories. Between the lines and shadings of these unstable landscapes, the macro meets the micro, the physical becomes mental, the vertical defies the horizontal, the solid answers to the liquid, strength cohabits with the vulnerable, and the wild takes on a domesticated look. Stelios Faitakis is presenting “Elegy of May, Part I: The Deepness Of Things” and “Elegy of May, Part II: The Round Table, two murals on the theme of non-submission, with the artist weaving connections between the events of May 68 as influenced by Situationist thought, which he now updates with the current actions of the 15-M Movement who have been attempting to shake up our era. For this first original collaboration in an institution, Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, also known as JR & OSGEMEOS, have worked in a secret underground tunnel in the Palais de Tokyo to present “Manutention”. During the German Occupation of France (1940-44), the basements of the Palais de Tokyo were used to store thousands of pianos confiscated from Jews during the Nazis’ “furniture roundups”. Working on the memories of these walls, the artists have stuck up photographs – including some from the Koblenz album – produced paintings based on archive pictures, burnt the ceilings and made sculptures from candles. Olivier Kosta-Théfaine has taken charge of three cupolas, on which he has composed “Soffitto”, a burnt sky with a lighter, a technique coming from the entrances to blocks of council flats, where young kids burn time by writing in fire on the ceilings, thus mingling classic frescoes from Italian palazzos with the traditions of everyday inner-city vandalism.
Info: Curator: Hugo Vitrani, Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, Duration: 13/7/16- , Wed-Mon 12:00-00:00, www.palaisdetokyo.com
