Cosmic Spring / Jardin Infiní

Centre Pompidou Metz, 2017

The architecture -the landscaping, the gardening- designed for Cosmic Spring tries to create a feeling of ‘outside’ inside the museum. A the gallery 3 this is achieved through the constant entering and exiting of the rooms disposed as the houses of a village and the creation of small squares. At gallery 2 the challenge was to create a space open as a big park, intervened and still to be occupied at the same time, as those wastelands irregularly planted with espontaneous orchards and vegetable gardens at the outskirts of any city.

If the space of gallery 3 forces the viewer to move fast, turning constantly to right or left, in rigid square angles that create a narrow space with few options of direction; the space of gallery 2 invites to lose time, lay down, ludicly interact with artworks while the space receives and gently opens itself to the visitor bodies, and expands beyond the windows of the museum.

The gallery 3 was painted in different hues of brown, from greenish to dryblood, and was iluminated in a nocturnal moonlight hue. It was oppresive and dark. The gallery 2 was bright and wide open, the floor was gently inclined, getting higher towards the center of the space and the lighting in the ceiling was programed to move as clouds in spring.

If an exhibition is an experiment to articulate reality, to confuse the inside and the outside of the exhibition is one of the first duties of art: the space of the museum cannot be longer a space for the accumulation of artifacts, isolated and protected from the outside, but a place where our relations with objects and reality is reconfigured. The importance relies in what happens when leaving those gardens and confront reality again.

Photography: Andrea Rossetti