PARIS — This 12 months, Paris didn’t slip again into la rentrée, that annual return from summer time break to common life, a lot as lurch into it. What’s normally a seasonal shrug — crowded trains, buzzing cafés, full faculties — has grow to be a barometer of nationwide discontent. 5 prime ministers in two years, a fragmented Nationwide Meeting, and the regular rise of Marine Le Pen’s far proper have left France polarized to the purpose of vertigo. Transport shutdowns, pupil blockades, and museum strikes have turned back-to-school rhythms into acts of protest.
On a balmy September afternoon, simply two days after large-scale protests opposing the austerity measures proposed by Prime Minister François Bayrou’s authorities happened, volunteers recruited by way of an open name of “everybody from 7 to 99” reenacted “Divisor” (1968), one in every of late Brazilian avant-garde artist Lygia Pape’s most iconic participatory performances, on the streets of Paris. The occasion opened the Competition d’Automne — a three-month celebration of dance, theater, music, efficiency, and visible artwork — and marked the inauguration of Lygia Pape: Weaving House, the artist’s first solo exhibition in France on the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Assortment.
I arrived an hour earlier than the efficiency and drifted by means of the rooms. The present is small however tightly curated, a compressed burst of a few of Pape’s most emblematic works that showcases the breadth of her experimental apply throughout media. In a single gallery, the brief movie “O ovo” (The Egg, 1967) performs. In it, Pape presses towards the taut pores and skin of a white dice on a seashore, tears by means of, and crawls into the sand — geometry giving strategy to flesh. Throughout the room, a panoramic projection of “Divisor,” carried out at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna in 2010, spans the wall. In a plexiglass case sits “Livro da Criação” (Guide of Creation, 1959–60), a defining piece of Pape’s Neo-Concrete interval. It takes the type of 16 artist books that unfold pop-up sculptural varieties akin to triangles flaring into hearth, a fan unfurling a wheel, and a purple disc changing into a clock — a cosmos animated by our arms.
On show, too, is the monumental “Livro Noite e Dia III” (Guide of Night time and Day III, 1963–76), comprising 365 carved wood items organized right into a shifting subject of black, white, and grey that maps the every day swing between gentle and darkish throughout a 12 months. And a beautiful grouping of the Tecelares, woodcut prints she made all through the Nineteen Fifties depicting labyrinthine geometric motifs, works as an anteroom for what’s undoubtedly the showstopper: the dazzling “Ttéia 1, C” (2001–7), through which a whole bunch of copper wires stretch throughout a pitch-dark room lit by spotlights, an immersive sensory expertise that itself adjustments with our actions.
Again on the road, “Divisor” expands that very same participatory precept to a collective scale. Greater than 100 individuals ducked below a protracted white sheet, their heads popping by means of slits, as they spilled out from the rear of La Bourse’s imposing neoclassical facade and glided like a large white amoeba throughout the esplanade towards La Canopée des Halles. Telephones held excessive, some filmed themselves and their fellow travellers. The temper was upbeat, buoyant; young children on the entrance gave the procession a playful air.
Strolling alongside this unusual, beautiful spectacle, it struck me that “Divisor” endures as a result of it makes us really feel collectivity as a bodily situation relatively than an idea — the comb of hair, the burden of material, the awkward give-and-take with strangers, freedom examined in public area. But this reenactment carries a hint of its personal scaffolding — the museum, social media, the logic of the pageant. In that sense, the Paris version of “Divisor” felt much less like a time capsule than a pulsing diagnostic: a fleeting republic stitched from material, our bodies, and hashtags.
Lygia Pape: Weaving House continues at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Assortment (2 Rue de Viarmes, Paris, France) by means of January 26, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Emma Lavigne with Alexandra Bordes.
