Bell Pavilion / Peso Von Ellrichshausen

Architects: Pezo von Ellrichshausen
Location: CS10022 Place de la Libération, 94404 Vitry-sur-Seine, France
Area: 50.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Marc Domage

Collaborators: Diego Perez, Teresa Freire, Shota Nemoto
Authors: Mauricio Pezo, Sofia von Ellrichshausen
Constructor: Jacky Cremona, So.Ré.Bat S.A.
Client: Christian Boltanski
Production: Solo Galerie, Christian Bourdais, Eva Albarran

From the architect. This is a room for a continuous video projection, for the documentation of a monumental but fragile installation made by Christian Boltanski in the Atacama Desert. With two concentric cylinders and two tunnel-like extensions, this sculptural piece is meant to erode its own figure in order to re-enact an inner landscape. It is a dimly lit, opaque and seamless chamber, rough enough so as to evoke the original distant place where the installation was recorded.

The radius of the smallest cylinder is, in fact, defined both by a fine-tuned equipment and by the precise distance of an observer immersed in the projected image. The other cylinder, as a consequence of the reversible path to go from outside to outside, might be read as a leftover of the inner corner in which the recorded landscape is projected. It is somehow difficult to understand how a small building can contain a massive landscape in its modest entrails. Here, what seems to be a defensive gesture towards the surrounding garden is no other than a haven for the devious and fleeting overlap between reality and fiction.