THE INSTANTS OF SPLENDOUR

Paris, April 2024

THÉO MERCIER is a passing hacker who explores the in-betweens to embrace the poetic contradictions our world is made of. As a sandman who reveals ghosts with the dust he spreads, the French sculptor, curator and stage director redefines the usual patterns and cycles to reveal and question our relationships to things, and to others.

It’s becoming hard to list all the places the French artist presented his work at, as he inhabits as many territories as the stones he collects. From Villa Medici, Palais de Tokyo, Le Musée de la Chasse, La Conciergerie, Le Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille, worldwide museums and galleries to performance spaces, Théo Mercier and his studio take every opportunity to collectively think about new ways to produce, look and experience.

Passing from objects to bodies to spaces, Théo’s approach challenges the rules of presentation and contemplation of both contemporary art and performing arts to offer another imagery, which carries a poesy of reality as well as a political and ecological commitment. In summary, multiple worlds that bear witness to “the brief instant of splendour that is our passage on earth”.

How have your artistic vision and approach evolved over the last ten years?

In the beginning, my work was really about the object: how and what they are made of, what we see and what we don't. Then, I began to open up my practice to live performance and developing a collective work process. I've always been attracted to the performing arts. There's a generosity and humility in live performance that I feel close to, something you can't take hold of and that's constantly being renewed. I discovered other ways of producing, collaborating and relating to the audience. So, I quickly moved between white cubes and dark rooms. By mixing sculpture and staging, I realized that neither of these two mediums, as they are practised today, corresponds to me totally. What interests me is the place in between. My work remains in zones of contradiction, which is formally translated by games of inversions and dualities such as hot-cold, fragile-solid, and eternal-ephemeral. It's this transition from one to the other that interests me. Over the last few years, my team and I have been trying to think up new ways of producing, inventing new ways of looking at things and breaking with the usual patterns. Each project ultimately questions our relationship with the world.

Production is the other aspect that is becoming increasingly important in my practice. In 2024, an artist doesn't make much sculpture – he makes appointments, Excel spreadsheets, he talks a lot about money, square meters, calendars. In the beginning, I suffered a little from this, so I started wondering how I could take hold of this producer status to invent art productions that raise artistic and political issues. Today, my work is as much about the form things take as about the way they are made. How can we think about new manufacturing ecologies and economies? How can we create new relationships with teams and highlight the people we work with? I try to question all the things that have always bothered me about the neo-liberal system that is contemporary art. Each project is an attempt and leads to new decisions, such as no longer transporting sculptures, removing the picture rails, etc. We have a kind of internal manifesto that we follow in the studio, always creating new rules of the game.

It's a global process, very much connected to people and the world. What is your relationship with reality? 

It's true that humans are always at the heart of my scenarios. They're often invisible, but there's always their imprint, their ghosts. The question of the trace is a common thread in my work: what do we impregnate ourselves with, what disappears, what escapes us? What scars and imprints remain? I love the world, in all its inconsistencies, contradictions and complexity. My work is nourished by all kinds of experiences: the street, travel, the unknown, parties... It speaks of our relationship with things, which in turn speak of our relationship with others. Attraction, repulsion, fragility, melancholy... What I propose is very much rooted in reality, it's an imaginary [realm] that speaks of everyday life.

In fact, all your projects are closely linked to the territory in which they take place.  

Yes, always. Each project is a reaction to the world, to the big world and to the small world(s). I try to work in reaction to all these environments - to the Villa Medici, to the city of Prague, to the dynamics of an international tour in theatres. I need to settle my imagination in a story, an architecture. If you give me a blank page, I don't know what to do.

Left Top **Courrèges**
Right Top **Celine Homme**, denim **Prada**

You are also described as an explorer and collector. What do you collect?  

I move a lot of stuff around, all the time. I just packed my bag, and there are 50 kg of stones in it. I realize that not many people regularly fill and carry bags of stones. [Laughs] I think it's mostly a matter of encounters. I collect a lot of stones because they're often obvious encounters for me. They become receptacles for something I have in mind. The roughness of their surface acts as a catalyst for an idea I have at the moment. It's quite a magical relationship. These stones can be found at my home, in Paris and Marseille, in my studio, in my installations, everywhere. I also collect handicrafts, mainly masks and ceramics, with a more traditional relationship to a collection. Then, each project has its own collection, its own obsession. We do a lot of sourcing, which can range from stones to refrigerators. For example, we spend a year looking for all the aquarium stones available. It becomes a way of exploring and becoming passionate about something over a period of time. But I don't keep any of these collections afterwards; they're just passing collections that allow me to take an overview of a place.

I find the expression "passing collections" very evocative because, in most of your installations, we can feel something that is consumed and doesn't last. What is your relationship with time?

I often say that I live double, even triple. I sleep very little and live between day and night, several jobs, several cities. I think this reflects a great fear of death that gives me a great zest for life! This idea of the end is omnipresent in my work and in my way of living. My work talks a lot about that brief instant of splendour that is our passage on Earth, about something that is there and can be gone in the next second. It may sound banal, but the question of the moment, the one before and the one after, is really a part of me. It's just as true in our little personal stories as it is in the big stories of our societies. One day you're healthy, the day after you're sick and your life can change completely. One day you're madly in love and the next one you're dumped. [Laughs] My work is about these instants, these tipping points. It’s about human time.

Speaking of the end, what happens to your pieces after an exhibition?  

The beautiful thing about the projects of the last four years is that they don't really end, because we use a borrowing method. We borrow the matter by taking it out of its usual cycle – extracting sand from a quarry, cars from a junkyard, fridges from a rubbish dump, tons of compressed garbage from a sorting centre. In a way, we're hacking the usual cycle of the matter and invite the viewers to witness a moment of this matter. Then we return it to its usual context. In the end, these projects aren't kept, they're transformed like everything else. The mattresses at the Conciergerie have probably become a Bouygues building. It’s beautiful to think that in one of the walls of this tower, there's probably one of my sand dogs.

It's also about giving form to things that can't be possessed, hacking, as you say, into the classical art market.  

Exactly. The artworks don't stop and don't belong. The question of metamorphosis has been very present in our way of doing things for some years now. I reveal things of the world that already exist, as if I'd put dust on a ghost and it would appear. The world is already so saturated, I don't want to clutter it up, so I try to work with it. The question is how to make the maximum gesture with the minimum ecological impact.

Left Hood **Courrèges**, top **Celine Homme**
Right Sweater **Dries Van Noten**

I'd like to get back to staging. What does "choreography" mean to you?  

Choreography is related to the question of movement. Independently of my work as a stage director, the movement consideration is very present in my hangings and in my relationship with spectators/visitors. I talk a lot about the gaze choreography, about points of view, perspective, the movement of a person or a group of people. I think almost more about choreography when I make an exhibition than when I create a dance piece!

In view of your new piece, Skinless, which was shown for the first time last month in France, what kind of relationship did you want to create with the audience?

Skinless is a piece that presents a landscape of 90 tons of compressed waste. It is programmed in traditional live performance spaces, for this type of audience that goes with the ritual of going to see a show at 8 pm. It was very important to me that the audience wasn’t distanced from this devastated world, that people were physically involved in this matter that stains, smells, makes noise and is inhabited by insects. The piece isn't directly about our consumer society or ecological disaster, it's about love. Because I involve people's bodies in this landscape, I can speak of love. Matter speaks for itself, but it doesn't speak loudly. You have to get close to it, be trapped by it. So far, we've played ten dates with small audiences of 150 people. Every night, two or three people have had dizzy spells. People weren't ready at 8 pm to find themselves stuck standing between two walls of garbage, watching something very slow. Even if it wasn't my intention at the outset, I find all these reactions and contradictions very interesting.

Once again, you're hacking the habits and comforts we've come to expect as viewers. How do you talk about love?

The starting point is stories of separation. All this waste, this packaging, these leftovers are like the dead skin of desire. They're things we've wanted very badly, on the shelves, on the internet, and we don't want them anymore. They embody the desire to possess and the residue that follows. Throwing things away is a rather magical gesture. Things "disappear", but in reality, they don't. In a way, it's like the return, the ghost of those fallen things we put in the dark. The play proposes a kind of reconciliation with what we've rejected. It's a love story built on infertile soil, and it asks how can we continue to make love in this devastated world. What can be born from everything we've rejected? All kinds of things. It's both a rotten land and a future full of promises. It's not a pejorative point of view, but rather a great compost of our histories and what can emerge from it. The piece also invites us to think about a new ecology for our relationships. If we could reconcile ourselves with everything we reject, we'd be living in another world. So, even if it seems harsh at first glance, it's a utopia that moves towards the light.

You question a lot about our relationship with the world. How do you face the world with this kind of project?

I'm a poet in front of the catastrophe, not a judge. Because I don't bring any solutions to the world, even in my lifestyle I do a lot of things I don't agree with. My life is full of contradictions too. I don't know much, I just bring a point of view. I see these worlds as our future places, made of hope after all.

Speaking of poetry, I'm also struck by the titles of your works. Most of them convey a poetic melancholy. What's your relationship with words?

I write quite a lot. My titles are often little punchlines, but only for me. [Laughs] My notebooks are full of half drawings, half words. Words also interest me from a visual point of view, from how they graphically resonate with each other. Céline Peychet, who runs the studio, is particularly involved in this area of words. We really do have a voice for two, I love that exchange. We have a WhatsApp group where we play little games to find titles, no holds barred. [Laughs] The titles we choose have a musicality and contain several stories. They're like little riddles.

One last question. After all these worlds we've talked about, which one are you dreaming of? 

Another one. I don't know, it could be so different... There are many things about humans that I don't understand. I don't think I can answer this question without quoting hippie phrases, which I won't do even though I strongly mean them. [Laughs]

Interview by Hanna Pallot

Photography by Pablo Saez

Fashion by Jonathan Huguet

Grooming by Miwa Moroki

Stylist’s assistant Rebecca Perrier

THE INSTANTS OF SPLENDOUR

IN-BETWEEN, UNCANNY ZONE