periferia

SPRING 2020, at Place du Palais Royal, Paris.

Chez Nous is a monumental installation that creates a social space for individual and collective reflection about the paradox of love. It is an artwork accessible to everyone that creates countless opportunities to have conversations.  Its location, Place du Palais Royal, has historically been a space between the public and the private spheres. This setting has an evolving history of multiple uses: visual, social, and political. This project is conceived as a reflection on social issues, as a mean to start responsible exchanges and discussing without fear private and public matters. Chez Nous is intended to be a space of meaning and questions of the physical and psychological spaces –private and public– we navigate everyday. 

Lassla Esquivel, curator, project manager

Chez Nous is an installation, located on the Place du Palais Royal, built from the gates and padlocks of the Pont des Arts and the Pont de l‘Archevêché recovered by the artist Carmen Mariscal. Chez Nous is designed as a “prison house” and announces the symbolic materialization of domestic traps. The artist raises the following questions: Why has the padlock, symbol of oppression and confinement, paradoxically, become the symbol of eternal love? Is love a link or a chain? Is the house, a refuge or a prison? Is the padlock a symbol of attachment or imprisonment? The sculpture is both solid and fragile, dark and luminous. For Carmen Mariscal, it is an archetypal space that should invite the everyday passers-by to reflect on love and its permanence.

Christine Frérot, art historian and art critic

Carmen Mariscal is a Mexican visual artist.  Born in the US, in California, she lives and works in Paris, France. She works in different disciplines such as installation, sculpture, video, photography and theatre design.  Recurrent themes in her work are fragility, confinement and memory. She has had individual and collective exhibitions in both public and private venues in Mexico, the US, Spain, France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Malaysia and Russia.

Pont des Arts and Pont de l'Archevêché in Paris, are famous landmarks for lovers to visit and ‘lock their love’ by placing a padlock along these structures. This tradition endangered the bridges’ foundations as well as the city’s cultural heritage and natural environment,  resulting in the locks & grids removal. They are currently stored at the Council of the First District in Paris. 

Chez Nous (At Home) is a public sculpture built using the recovered padlocks and grids from these bridges. The 35m2 sculpture will be a model archetype of a house as perceived during childhood. The metaphor of the house as both a safe place and a prison – a private space where one is protected (padlocks), but also imprisoned (no doors or windows).

This project reflects a contemporary social concern: That misunderstood romantic love can turn free relationships into bondage and isolation. Chez Nous encourages the audience to question the physical and psychological spaces we live in every day. Chez Nous reflects on the very essence of love, is it freedom or is it chains?  

The sculpture placed in the heart of Paris at Place du Palais Royal, a timeless landmark, between the Louvre museum and Palais Royal garden, where the famous Daniel Buren’s columns are, one of the most prominent artists of the international art world today.

Chez Nous is developed in partnership with Periferia Projects to consolidate the artistic and social impact of public art.

Chez Nous uses the public space to sensitise a wider audience about social and environmental issues through artistic practice:

Environmental impact of popular traditions: Raise awareness of visual pollution, damaging cultural heritage and environmental issues.

Support Women: Supporting women as important actors in our society and fight for gender equality

Support art with social impact: Enabling art projects as platforms to encourage conversations that address and promote social responsibility such as protection, empowerment and representation of vulnerable groups.

Support social engaged art in public spaces: Raising awareness of the social impact of art in public spaces as an actor of change.

 Chez Nous’ Values

•Raise awareness of domestic violence as an urgent social issue to address

•Promote, support and acknowledge the commitment and hard work of associations that offer vulnerable women and children opportunity for a fresh start and a home after being subjected to domestic violence

•Give a voice to the victims, who often are silenced

•Use the public space to sensitise a wider audience

Opening 12 March 2020, 8pm light and sound live at Place du Palais Royal

Ends 1 June 2020

Artiste : Carmen Mariscal Commissariat : Lassla Esquivel, Periferia Projects Manager des opérations : Camila Melo Production : Agence Eva Albarran & Co. Conceptualisation : Patricia Keever Relations presse : Anne Samson Communication Design graphique : César Jara