A pink-and-black striped corridor led to
the main space, which held, atop a white
Romanesque vessel, a collision of the natu-
ral and the hyperrealistic.
Asked why they wanted to use digi-
tal imagery as a hybridized component, Vil-
lard says that he and Gabillet are ‘interested
in how motifs and textures allow material-
ity to be changed. We wanted to see how a
virtual image projected onto something real
could modify human perception.’ Unsur-
prisingly, the richly textured objects excited
young visitors. ‘Children climbed onto the
fountain and tried to catch the changing
forms as if it were a game.’
Surrounding the vessel, a wallpapered
surface featured rocks floating between classi-
cal columns, reflecting Studio GGSV’s research
into ‘ecology and illusion’, which will continue
to be carried out at its Villa Medici residency
in Rome until August. ‘By combining the min-
eral and the digital,’ says Gabillet, ‘we can talk
to children through motifs that remind them
of video games and to adults through motifs
referencing the history of art. It’s all part of our
aim to create a false reality.’
GGSV’s layering of the contempo-
rary fairy tale was not merely visual. Fully
embracing Galeries Lafayette’s commission,
the studio asked writer Laetitia Paviani to
compose a tale that would resonate with
its proposal. Paviani’s story – about an old
spirit who, faced with a vanishing world, fills
his mind with a landscape of natural phe-
nomena in order to preserve it in memory- was narrated in the exhibition, creating a
multisensory experience. – AS
ggsv.fr
Although Demain’s various rooms appear
to have little in common, they each
explore materiality and shape within the
fairy-tale theme.‘We wanted
to see how
a virtual
image
projected
onto
something
real could
modify
human
perception’
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