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Through the looking-glass

Project description

Through the looking-glass is a site-specific installation achieved as part of the Artloop festival in the Baltic sea resort town of Sopot, Poland.

Olga Mokrzycka and I were invited to create a work which would be installed in a quite singular setting, the Berger Villa: a quasi-abandoned 1900's mansion located in one of the residential neighbourhoods of Sopot. Most parts of this neo-renaissance villa, built in 1881, have been disused for the last decades, and the derelict looking building sits nowadays amongst tick bushes that used to be a well-tended garden.

The side of the mansion was adorned with a majestic stained-glass orangery, at the centre of which stood a fountain, and where exotic trees could be enjoyed during the cold winter days. It stands completely empty today: the fountain is dried up, and the walls are greyish-brown with accumulated dust. It is this space we were offered to use for our installation. 

Observing this orangery, Olga and I realised that putting any kind of alien work of art would destroy the eerie poetry of this place. We decided thus to create a quasi-invisible work, whose effect would only emphasise the orangery's delicate state of ruin. 

Current photo

Photo #1 by Nicolas Grospierre

Installation view, Villa Bergera, Sopot, 2013