Overview
Parreno has transformed the building's Rotunda into an almost weightless, timeless territory with Echo2: a Carte Blanche (2022) – a collaborative project between the artist and Arca, Nicolas Becker and Tino Sehgal. In this total environment, air and light, past, present and future, and reality and fiction commingle to a spectral, otherworldly effect.
At the centre of the space is a projection of Philippe's video work, Anywhere Out of the World (2000), in which the fabled character Annlee becomes cognisant of her fictionality. The emancipation of Anlee's image is made concrete by the appearance of Annlee (2011), Tino Sehgal’s 'constructed situation', where young actresses come to incarnate her in the space, blurring the border between reality and fiction. From this diptych emerges the idea that a a fictional character – an image, a sign – can assume personhood, just like the human visitors it interacts with.
This is not the only non-human agent at play: a 'bioreactor' takes control over the lights, sounds and movement at work in the space. Composed of yeast – microscopic, single-cell fungi – this bioreactor has a 'brain' of its own, with its evolution and actions conditioned by the temperature, noise, humidity, light outside the museum.
In addition to the voices of Anlee, an infinite composition created in collaboration with the musician Arca spreads throughout the exhibition. Its lines are continually echoed and modified by an artificial intelligence, itself influenced by the atmospheric conditions and presence of visitors. Like a huge acoustic eardrum, the circular movement of a mobile wall sends back Annlee’s refrain. Heliostats, like firefiles, sweep the space of the Rotunda with refracted sunlight, making the perception of reality flicker and shift.
The installation is regulated by an algorithm that configures the behaviour of the various 'quasi-objects'. The work is thus located in a tension between the random and the rational: while the programme controls certain triggers, the movement of the balloons is modified by the visitors. In the same way, time becomes elastic: the different works, some of which Parreno created years ago, become perpetually reborn.
