For the first time in many years, the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale is drawing attention. Three pine trees, their roots visible in a big clod of earth, move slowly, by themselves, through the crowd in the building and alley in the Giardini. They cover eight metres an hour and their strange choreography can be easily and harmlessly watched. They dance according to variations in the flow of their sap and their sensitivity to light, shade and rain so that they are “in time with their metabolism”, says the artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.
Inside, the glass roof has been removed to create an open-air theater. Visitors can come and go freely (there are no queues at the French pavilion), and they are invited to sit or lie on foam seats installed in the style of a classical amphitheater. There, they can listen to a low-key sound wave of low-voltage electricity produced by eight other trees in the park. It is a calm space where visitors can escape the frenzy of the biennale for a while and find refuge. It is meant to be "a place to relax and float in a harmonious continuum", says the curator Emma Lavigne, who organised the pavilion. She invites visitors to "join this slow motion, and become an integral part of the work". The piece is called Rêvolution, a mix of revolution and “rêve” (dream).
The French government made an unexpected move by choosing an artist with such technological demands. For the first time, the artist was chosen by a jury from among 35 candidates. Until now the choice was le fait du prince, after a deal between the ministries of foreign affairs and culture. The culture minister herself, Fleur Pellerin, opened the pavilion on 7 May, mentioning that France will host the 21st United Nations conference on climate change at the end of the year.
Boursier-Mougenot, a musician born in 1961, dreams of what he calls “deserted zoos”. (He also says he wants to create images with a bunch of cats.) He claims an “animist vision of nature” as well as a link with German romanticism and Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry. He is obviously inspired by scientists like Jakob von Uexküll, the biologist who stressed that each living organism has its own world. Lavigne also finds sources sources in modern art, like John Cage's musical performances, Anna Halprin’s choreographies, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Tree Dance (1971) and Robert Morris’s seminal Box with the sound of its own making (a walnut box broadcasting the sounds of its own construction, 1961).
A robotics laboratory in Toulouse conducted lengthy experiments to transcribe the energy from the trees into this mix of movement and sound. Lavigne says she wanted to "upset the borders in the Giardini". The main challenge, however, was administrative: working with strict rules, budget cuts and the cost of local workers in the Biennale. Part of the installation that was not installed is described in the catalogue. The artist planned to change the two aisles into a wide camera obscura. The aisles were left empty, but the artist now says he is happy to add some emptiness to his slow motion tree dance.