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dates : 20/12.08 - 01/10.09

horaires:

samedi et dimanche seulement 14.00 - 17.00

prix: 3 €

adresse:

Palais de Chaillot

1 place du Trocadero

Paris 16ème

tel: +33 (0)1 42 18 56 50

site: http://www.citedechaillot.fr

plan: www.multimap.com

 

Difficult, as an architect, to fall for the ‘trompe l’oeil’ installed at the Palais de Chaillot by fashion designer Martin Margiela for the Suite Elle Decoration. One can’t help but see that the place has nothing to do with an Haussman building. The Palais de Chaillot was built in 1937 for the ‘Exposition Universelle’ and the top floor apartment has an outstanding double height living room with panoramic views, which has very little to do with your average Haussman building. This incongruity is disturbing to say the least.

So what has Martin Margiela, mysterious and often very conceptual fashion designer part of the ‘Six of Antwerp’ tried to communicate in this installation? The suspended ceiling, decorated with fake mouldings, obviously does not belong to the building. It may be a carbon copy of the apartment Martin Margiela used to work in, a place transposed to another address. But one also wonders about the hole in the ceiling, which appears to have been punched... deliberately? This hole reveals the skeleton of the existing building, the base structure of this installation...


Then as an architect, one would like to see the flip side of the coin, and reveal the building behind the installation, before MMM’s intervention. Perhaps the suite should be shown naked one day, as found by the designers before they undertake their transformations. Be able to see this ‘skeleton’ from which they start working. Each season the suite is being dressed by a different designer, which leads us to compare the successive results but also leads us to imagine the Before/After situations.


However, I do think that this intervention alone begs for being ‘uncovered’. One would inevitably want to see what the designer is hiding, starting with removing the white covers on the furniture in the entrance. One is curious to see what lies beneath and MMM plays with our curiosity to blur the perception of things that are there and you can see, things that you can see are no longer there and things that you image are really there.


PS neither the audio, nor the video installation and lighting were in working order at the time of my visit. A real pity. Part of the installation was missing...

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