Production and installation of a sculpture in the Grand Palace of Paris
The artist Huang Yong Ping took possession of the nave of the Grand Palace in a project which he designed for the 2016 edition of Monumenta. Challenging due to its excessiveness, its technical constraints and its installation, the artist proposed his vision of the real world through a symbolic landscape.
Entitled “Empires”, the installation is composed of a 250 meter fused aluminum skeleton of a long snake, about 300 shipping containers, a crane 40 meters high and Napoleon’s bicorn hat, 10 meters high.
As a member of the ArtProject team, my role was that of a technician, working on the assembly and the pre-mounting of the snake skeleton. Pioneering an installation of this magnitude, ArtProject and its partners knew how to find the proper solutions to give life to this project, which took more than a year to prepare prior to its installation in Paris.
Not long ago, I was interviewed at the Gare de Nantes by a local journalist. The journalist asked me how to best describe my contribution to the concrete tree sculpture; as an artist or an artisan? Normally, this type of question would have left me speechless, had I not thankfully prepared a very polite, very vague answer:
“we are a bit of both”