Matali Crasset: For now there are the Fl'om, then a hippocampus in a blown glass test tube and a mysterious pangolin that never really materializes. They are only presences that, in some cases, only need to be heard. They come alive and interact with the viewers, whom I think will be the true inhabitants of Blobterre. Then the filter of childhood is the underlying theme. It is a more than metaphorical relationship with this fictional territory where everyone is invited to use the materials and at the same time to sharpen their abilities to hybridize form.
It is from the observation of children's splendid exercises in abstraction that you create and suggest the use of a space before it is a look at your aesthetics
Fl'om, half man, half-flower, has eyelashes that are petals, the seahorse floats in glass, but nearby are two empty glass bubbles ready to host other hybrid creations born from viewers' fantasies. I think I worked on an open, generous project with a large dose of utopia; more than in previous installations, where I managed to involve all my regular colleagues. The companies I work with, the schools with which I am engaged in workshops and in the many ateliers that I have opened around the world were used to trigger all available synergies.
Yes, unfortunately except those with whom it would have taken too long to launch a project. It is an installation and not a retrospective; it is primarily a way to continue to ask questions about design, how it works today, in its interactions with the world of production; and even about its possible enjoyment once it is placed in a museum.
No, there was no strategic calculation. I worked with my devices simply imagining a territory in which multi-faceted activities can come about. I worked closely with Corinne Rosental-Roskam, who for years was responsible for educational services at Centre Pompidou. Together, we worked in harmony and evaluated the possibility of how to create interaction with the public. A utopian model, but very real, not merely in a museum space and with the Beaubourg "brand".
Blobterre it is primarily a way to continue to ask questions about design, how it works today, in its interactions with the world of production
I sought, rather, everyone's complicity in developing and defining the possibilities of a second nature. Artificial, but to be lived, to dwell in and maybe not only to contemplate passively. The playful and purposeful aspect for children can open scenarios regarding rituals and topics that concern us all.
Will it work?
The device is simple but it has its own glossary. There are estratoofs , dome structures made from plants germinated directly from the ground. Each is dedicated to a task, simple or complex, anthropologically linked to our sensory functions: touch, hearing, seeing or just generating sounds and rhythms. Animation (the one on the website - editor's note) explains the genesis of the landscape that is there, to be transformed.
In this sense, the center's mediators will play an important role. I finished brainstorming sessions with the people who will guide the viewer and groups through the different opportunities offered; helping explore the Blobterre scenarios, providing materials and tools that I imagined to animate it and helping understand the atmosphere that will be breathed even during the use of simulations of using the different camouflages and objects. The facilitator suggests talking about tattoos or make-up and triggers a short circuit between ancestral and contemporary practices. At any time, valid, but different, screenplays are born to be invented and to practice.
You can get lost in smelling or reconstructing a scent or searching the horizon of more technological sounds and sensations, walking along the spectrogram.
So you go into Blobterre as an unusual world where you can live for an hour or an entire season?
I like to think about the idea of having given the gift of a long spring to the Beaubourg (she laughs ...); it is the best time to talk about growth, about symbiosis with nature while thinking about the structure of the primitive or modern myth. Design, after all, speaks of the simplicity of sitting down, of the lying down of life around structures that can enhance our capacity for hearing or seeing. It helps us orient ourselves in unknown things and situations, facilitating understanding and teaching us to experience them in better ways.
I think it's a stimulating piece for everyone and I imagine a Blobterre effect since this explosion of creativity at the Centre Pompidou has germinated and is there to be experienced in the most natural way possible.