Place Vendôme

UNE COLONNE D’EAU, 2017

Life Prototype, 447 x 866 x 210cm
Rainwater, 326 x 225 x 210cm
Water Column, 325 x 800 x 210cm
Sun Riot, 1025 x 210cm
Tuyaux thermoplastiques, troncs d’arbres,
Chantal Crousel, Paris
Eva Presenhuber, Zürich, New York
Luhring Augustine, New York

Sculpture is a hole in the world. Not an object but its absence, a void. A sculpture lacks life, needs you, it’s an emptiness you occupy. Our world is water; make a sculpture for water, then. A pipe, a hole moving water through the earth, a passage from one place to another. Water is public space underground us. We need to go there, move through it ourselves, go inside the pipeline and live there. Sous le pavé, la pipeline. Sur le pave, la pipeline. On either side of the war memorial at the center of Place Vendôme, four sections of large diameter pipe are displayed above ground.

Engineered for use in civic scale floodwater management and rainwater retention, the recycled thermoplastic pipes are an architecture of water made visible, un pavillon de l’eau évaporé, a horizontal water monument. This is a pipeline you can walk through, a pipeline for people. Inside the pipes are tree trunks, cut from the Bois de Vincennes, installed in the interior of the pipelines. A tree is a biological indicator of the health of an ecosystem, record of the water we all depend on. Trees are solid water, live water. In the interior of the pipeline we are brought face to face with a tree, a nonhuman person.

In collaboration with Polypipe, technical partner of the installation.
© Oscar Tuazon, Dessin préparatoire pour le projet Fiac Hors-les-murs

With the support of:

Avec la collaboration de Polypipe, partenaire technique de l’installation
© Oscar Tuazon, Dessin préparatoire pour le projet Fiac Hors-les-murs,
Place Vendôme, 2017.

La FIAC bénéficie du soutien de son partenaire Place Vendôme :