PARIS — This 12 months, Paris didn’t slip again into la rentrée, that annual return from summer season break to common life, a lot as lurch into it. What’s often a seasonal shrug — crowded trains, buzzing cafés, full faculties — has change into a barometer of nationwide discontent. 5 prime ministers in two years, a fragmented National Assembly, and the regular rise of Marine Le Pen’s far proper have left France polarized to the purpose of vertigo. Transport shutdowns, scholar blockades, and museum strikes have turned back-to-school rhythms into acts of protest.
On a balmy September afternoon, simply two days after large-scale protests opposing the austerity measures proposed by Prime Minister François Bayrou’s authorities came about, volunteers recruited through an open name of “everybody from 7 to 99” reenacted “Divisor” (1968), considered one of late Brazilian avant-garde artist Lygia Pape’s most iconic participatory performances, on the streets of Paris. The occasion opened the Pageant d’Automne — a three-month celebration of dance, theater, music, efficiency, and visible artwork — and marked the inauguration of Lygia Pape: Weaving Space, the artist’s first solo exhibition in France on the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Assortment.
I arrived an hour earlier than the efficiency and drifted via the rooms. The present is small however tightly curated, a compressed burst of a few of Pape’s most emblematic works that showcases the breadth of her experimental follow throughout media. In a single gallery, the quick movie “O ovo” (The Egg, 1967) performs. In it, Pape presses towards the taut pores and skin of a white dice on a seaside, tears via, and crawls into the sand — geometry giving approach to flesh. Throughout the room, a panoramic projection of “Divisor,” carried out at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna in 2010, spans the wall. In a plexiglass case sits “Livro da Criação” (Guide of Creation, 1959–60), a defining piece of Pape’s Neo-Concrete interval. It takes the type of 16 artist books that unfold pop-up sculptural types reminiscent of triangles flaring into fireplace, a fan unfurling a wheel, and a purple disc turning into a clock — a cosmos animated by our arms.
On show, too, is the monumental “Livro Noite e Dia III” (Guide of Night time and Day III, 1963–76), comprising 365 carved picket items organized right into a shifting discipline of black, white, and grey that maps the each day swing between mild and darkish throughout a 12 months. And a stunning grouping of the Tecelares, woodcut prints she made all through the Nineteen Fifties depicting labyrinthine geometric motifs, works as an anteroom for what’s undoubtedly the showstopper: the dazzling “Ttéia 1, C” (2001–7), wherein a whole lot of copper wires stretch throughout a pitch-dark room lit by spotlights, an immersive sensory expertise that itself modifications with our actions.
Again on the road, “Divisor” expands that very same participatory precept to a collective scale. Greater than 100 members ducked underneath an extended white sheet, their heads popping via slits, as they spilled out from the rear of La Bourse’s imposing neoclassical facade and glided like a large white amoeba throughout the esplanade towards La Canopée des Halles. Telephones held excessive, some filmed themselves and their fellow travellers. The temper was upbeat, buoyant; young children on the entrance gave the procession a playful air.
Strolling alongside this unusual, pretty spectacle, it struck me that “Divisor” endures as a result of it makes us really feel collectivity as a bodily situation somewhat than an idea — the comb of hair, the burden of material, the awkward give-and-take with strangers, freedom examined in public house. But this reenactment carries a hint of its personal scaffolding — the museum, social media, the logic of the pageant. In that sense, the Paris version of “Divisor” felt much less like a time capsule than a pulsing diagnostic: a fleeting republic stitched from material, our bodies, and hashtags.
Lygia Pape: Weaving Space continues at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Assortment (2 Rue de Viarmes, Paris, France) via January 26, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Emma Lavigne with Alexandra Bordes.
