Didier Faustino — Le meilleur des mondes — Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 21 → December 4, 2011

Didier Faustino at the “Salon de L’Ifa”

Didier Faustino, guest at the 3rd “Salon de l’Ifa” (Ifa Trade Show), is seen as an unconventional character on the contemporary French scene.

Both artist and architect, he is known for his avantgarde creations, with a central focus on the body and exacerbation of the senses. This is the second time he will be exhibiting in the institution, as the Cité, while in its preparation stages at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, invited him in 2004 to design the set for the Nouveaux Albums des Jeunes Architectes, which he himself won in 2002. He came up with an approach that certainly stood out, using a “boardroom” inspired by the “war room” in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove.

He returns today, invited by Fiona Meadows, curator of the “Salon de l’Ifa”, after Jakob+ MacFarlane and the Périphériques architects. With this carte blanche, Didier Faustino took up residence at the heart of the museum’s historic collections. Thought of as the “ideal salon”, Le meilleur des mondes is an installation specifically created for the Cité.

It is designed as the distorted reflection of a meeting, a place of gathering, a space for exchange, dialogue and discussion in which power is exercised. This “micro-nation”, with its uncertain lines, questions our debate practices.

The strange and fragile proportions of this ensemble, on the verge of collapse, invite viewers to project themselves into it, without being able to stay.

It was during a visit to the “galerie des moulages” (the cast gallery), where reproductions of the Last Judgement are ever present on the tympana of Romanesque churches, that Didier Faustino had the idea of creating this new version of a boardroom. He awakens memories by comparing the size of the Carlu gallery to that of the Salle du Manège (or Riding Hall) in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, occupied by the revolutionary council.

Used to transgressions and the subversion of cultural references, he chose to install his exhibition Le meilleur des mondes in immediate proximity to the column-statues of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Senlis, symbolically decapitated in 1793.