Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project
The Plantamouves
Interactive Installation Exhibition
27 September 2023 - 25 Feburary 2024 | Creativity Gallery-Playground
Artists Clédat & Petitpierre present a workshop exhibition in the form of a landscape-sculpture in which the moving body becomes the beating heart of the installation. This sensory space encourages metamorphosis, play and travel beyond dreams. Children become the privileged members of a multicoloured, proliferating microcosm: the Plantamouves. Get into the dance and become a Plantamouve! With the help of choreographic tutorials, the public is invited to move, dance and reinvent movements based on many wearable extensions of the body. Come together and play a role in this strange ballet with a constellation of hybrid characters where movement is used to feed and activate the wonderful world of Plantamouves.
Clédat & Petitpierre
Yvan Clédat and Coco Petitpierre are an intensely close artist couple who met in 1986. They are sculptors, performers, choreographers and authors of a multiform work, in which the body is always transformed and put in motion.
They invent “sculptures to activate”, works they inhabit and bring to life in silent performances. Their choreographic and visual shows present dreamy and poetic worlds in which the bodies of the performers are transformed.
Alongside their shared practice, they collaborate with many directors and choreographers on the contemporary scene as scenographers and costume designers.
The Plantamouves, exhibition view, West Bund Museum
How did Plantamouves come about?
The project was born of a twofold desire: to make a work for a museum that engages the bodies of children and to avail of the vast space of the Galerie des enfants (in the Centre Pompidou) to create a large-size sculpture. In our shows and performances, we love to make elements that modify the body, fragment it, augment it and which require a specific choreographic language. Dance and sculpture are at the heart of our work, and we wanted to share that with children. We also had the architecture of the Centre Pompidou in mind, and we were happy to include a reference to the innumerable pipes it comprises.
The Plantamouves, exhibition view, West Bund Museum
Who are the Plantamouves?
The Plantamouves are marvellous plants that are both soft and monumental, proliferating and geometric and, above all, multicoloured!
They also produce sorts of fruits that are also geometrical, which the children can put on to play and dance. We loved imagining this extraordinary garden populated by this little dancing community, like an amused reference to Oskar Schlemmer’s Ballet triadique [Triadic Ballet].
The Plantamouves, exhibition view, West Bund Museum