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 colleges — has turn into 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, scholar 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 passed off, 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 Area, 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 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 follow throughout media. In a single gallery, the brief movie “O ovo” (The Egg, 1967) performs. In it, Pape presses in opposition to the taut pores and skin of a white dice on a seaside, tears by, and crawls into the sand — geometry giving approach 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” (E-book 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 comparable to triangles flaring into hearth, a fan unfurling a wheel, and a purple disc turning into a clock — a cosmos animated by our fingers.
On show, too, is the monumental “Livro Noite e Dia III” (E-book of Evening and Day III, 1963–76), comprising 365 carved picket models organized right into a shifting discipline of black, white, and grey that maps the every day swing between gentle and darkish throughout a 12 months. And a stunning grouping of the Tecelares, woodcut prints she made all through the Fifties depicting labyrinthine geometric motifs, works as an anteroom for what’s undoubtedly the showstopper: the dazzling “Ttéia 1, C” (2001–7), by which tons of of copper wires stretch throughout a pitch-dark room lit by spotlights, an immersive sensory expertise that itself modifications with our actions.
Again on the road, “Divisor” expands that very same participatory precept to a collective scale. Greater than 100 contributors ducked below an extended white sheet, their heads popping by slits, as they spilled out from the rear of La Bourse’s imposing neoclassical facade and glided like an enormous 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, pretty spectacle, it struck me that “Divisor” endures as a result of it makes us really feel collectivity as a bodily situation reasonably than an idea — the comb of hair, the load of material, the awkward give-and-take with strangers, freedom examined in public house. 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 fabric, our bodies, and hashtags.
Lygia Pape: Weaving Area continues at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Assortment (2 Rue de Viarmes, Paris, France) by January 26, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Emma Lavigne with Alexandra Bordes.
