At the heart of the white architecture of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Susanna Fritscher transforms one of the galleries suspended between earth and air into an imaginary landscape.
The Austrian artist who is established in France, and who recently turned the spaces of the Floating Worlds of the Lyon Biennial, the Nantes Museum of Art and the Louvre Abu Dhabi into immateriality, reinvents our relationship to reality, to what surrounds us, to the environment it raises, confusing the atmosphere with architecture that becomes liquid, aerial, vibrating. «The materials I use, plastics, films, veils or threads, are so volatile that they seem to merge with the volume of air they occupy. In the interplay they create in and with space, materiality shifts and changes: air now has a texture, a brilliance, a quality; we can perceive its flow, its movement. It acquires a palpable, modular reality – a reality that is almost visible – or audible, in my most recent works that can be described in terms of vibration, oscillation, of a wave, of a frequency…» specifies the artist.
She explores the ventilation system of the Centre Pompidou-Metz like an organism whose pulse she captures. The pulsations of the air emanating from its metabolism become the raw material for a choreography of lines formed by the long silicone threads that capture and reflect the light. The constantly reinvented undulating waves propagate and set in motion this impalpable forest that visitors are invited to cross. The grand nef of the arts’ centre resonates and amplifies the air that circulates in it, metamorphosing it into an immense body of sound, a wind instrument that allows the immense blasts of air to be set free from the building. This moving, contemplative and panoramic viewpoint captures the movements and shimmering of nature. As if by capillarity, the rhythms generated by these infinite lines of silicone, which Susanna Fritscher tames and orchestrates, vibrate and harmonize in unison with those of the bodies of the visitors, who are invited to detach themselves from gravity. This environment also makes the instability of the present time perceptible, and its quivering is a prelude or an invitation to possible upheavals.
