C.H.A.I.S.E.S. — La géométrie sociale du jardin du Luxembourg — New to the Wall Foundation - Espace de projet — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 21 days: October 20 → 22, 2026

From 20 to 22 October 2026 the New to the Wall Foundation presents C.H.A.I.S.E.S. — The Social Geometry of the Luxembourg Gardens, a three-day installation in the Marais that translates the silent choreography of the Luxembourg’s green chairs into sculpture, painting, drawing,sound and installation.

Every morning a gardener in the Jardin du Luxembourg resets the green metal chairs into a neutral grid. Over the day, Paris redraws them: two chairs that draw close and then drift apart, a single chair tracking the sun, a reader keeping an arm’s length of distance, a group forming for lunch. Nobody directs this choreography. Almost nobody sees it.

Jimmy Gardner, les quatre sculptures, 2026, rendus de l’édition bronze (cire perdue, 5 + 1 EA), env. 33 cm © NTTW Foundation

C.H.A.I.S.E.S. puts it in a room. Four scenarios observed in the garden over a year — the sun-worshipper, the lovers’ spat, the reader, the gathering — are captured as choreographic data (proximity, orientation, velocity, stillness, sounds) and translated by six artists into sculpture, paintings, drawings, kinetic scrolls, a sound performance played on an actual chair from the garden, and an installation that holds them all together in a room in the 3rd arrondissement.

“I noticed the chairs grouped in these little settings, and it hit me that they were a reflection of our society, of our humanity. How did they get like that? Then I started thinking about the chairs as data — vectors, trajectories. Everything followed from there.” Jimmy Gardner, originator of the project and co-founder of the New to the Wall Foundation

Quinn Lewis, Painted scene for a Kinetic Scroll (green chairs), 2026 — Oil on canvas © Quinn Lewis

The project is directed by Dutch, Paris-based artist and composer Allard van Hoorn, whose Urban Songlines have been shown at Tate St Ives, the Whitney Museum, MAAT Lisbon and the Van Abbemuseum. Jimmy Gardner shows four sculptures, one per scenario; he is joined by artists Quinn Lewis, Charlotte Tampol, Jessica Anne Schwartz and Wayne Pate, who drew the project’s emblem.

“The chairs have knowledge gathered over many years of usage — they are collective repositories of meaning that live in symbiosis with humans and practice slowness through continuous exchange — they radiate histories into the now, from seat-level.” Allard van Hoorn, creative director, sound and installation From 6 October, miniature Luxembourg chairs — 3D-printed from the original, tube by tube — leave the studio and are left around Paris: on ledges, on café tables, in the garden where they were born. Each carries a QR code in a pocket under its seat.

Whoever finds one keeps it, and reports where it now lives. The movement of the chairs, which has always reflected society, breaks out of the park and the exhibition into the city.

Artists: Jimmy Gardner, Allard van Hoorn, Quinn Lewis, Wayne Pate, Jessica Anne Schwartz, Charlotte Tampol

Lecteurs au bord du Grand Bassin, jardin du Luxembourg, 2026 © New to the Wall Foundation