10. Le jardin de l’ivresse

Exhilaration…: euphoric excitement triggered by a feeling, an emotion, a passion.

 

This exaltation – no matter how it comes about – is a state in which all of our perceptions are muddled and our senses jumbled up. This exhilaration, during which the boundaries of hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch become blurred and overlap, leads us to an explosion of the senses. 

A single footpath, made of glass, takes us through a wave of grasses from which architectured forms of flowers emerge that change colour over time – different heights, different colours and different shapes. The lines twist, rise and fall before eventually turning around to a rickety door. The ecstasy reaches such heights that dizziness sets in. The door, a fantastic, troubling silhouette and passage between two worlds, whets our desire to go through it and see what lies beyond. We thus find ourselves in a murky, wild undergrowth where white trunks break away and carry our attentions with them. The air is heavy with a blend of minty, alcoholic aromas. A strange piano, whose keys emit unexpected sounds, two gigantic chairs sitting on a soft green bed, catches our eye.

 

Margaux Degat – landscape architect

Her travels as a child and her love of the little family village of Lot stirred Margaux’s inborn curiosity and gave her a taste for landscapes and nature that soon led her well off the beaten track. During the four years she spent at the Higher School of Garden Architecture, she developed and explored her sensibilities through a heterogeneous range of projects in which she tried in particular to create real emotional cohesion between landscapes and their inhabitants. In her end-of-studies project, carried out under the supervision of Michèle Elsair, she defended the existence of a wild, secret hillside in the heart of the growing urbanisation of the Paris suburbs, carrying out research on the concept of “nature”. The following year was spent working for the Ministry for Ecology and Sustainable Development’s territories office, for which she produced a report on periurban space. Since September 2012, she has been working alongside Richard Arnou and Santiago Diaz at the Era landscaping agency in Ivry-sur-Seine.

 

Antoine Germain – creator of ephemeral spaces

Ever since his early childhood, Antoine has felt a need to communicate and share with others, to stir emotions, give rise to questions – do anything, in fact, that might forge a link between the person who imagines and the person who interprets. A lover of challenges with a baccalaureate to his credit, he turned his talents to event organisation, the design of ephemeral spaces in particular. In 2011, along with Timothée Selles, he set up an event organisation company focusing on the idea of “diversifying the event organisation landscape”. They scour the visual landscape together, only interested in two things – creation and originality. Design of architectural projections and organisation of one-off events enables Antoine to continue developing and using his creativity and ability to manage time factors, budgets and teams. In September 2012, his wish to contribute to the layout of an ephemeral landscaped space was granted when Margaux Degat asked him to take part in the Chaumont-sur-Loire Garden Festival project.

 

MINH TA - designer

Having attended sculpture classes by Stéphane Santi as a child, and with a Higher Technical Certificate in Industrial Product Design under his belt, it was not surprising that Minh Ta chose to continue his studies in a field that combined art and technical skills – design. He spent 2009 to 2011 at Strate College, following a programme that added theoretical and practical knowledge of materials and objects to his blossoming creativity. The course incorporated a number of placements (including at the Cartier factory and Stéphane Gérard’s workshops) and ended with oral defence of a dissertation that amazed his jury. By raising questions on the timeless nature of objects, Minh bore witness to a concern that would manifest itself in all his works. Through distortion and deconstruction, he seems determined to seize that crucial moment when material becomes object – an object he wishes to be both aesthetic and functional. Minh is always ready to diversify in parallel with his design activities. He creates costumes and props for short films, takes part in exhibitions, stages concerts and continues to sculpt. These days, after trying his hand at luxury design at Maison Cartier, he works alongside Arnold Goron, creating for such customers as Isabel Marant and Aurélie Bidermann.

 

Romain Gaudiche - composer

Romain Gaudiche was born in 1989, began to learn music at the age of 14, and is a bass guitarist and double-bass player by training. Initially attracted to the world of rock, he became increasingly interested in jazz, finally enrolling in Nancy’s M.A.I. (Music Academy International) in 2007 to train professionally. Upon completion of his course, he returned to Paris with a growing interest in electronic music, which led him to attend a lecture on its history in 2010. It was there that he discovered Pierre Henri and acousmatic music, for which he formed an immediate fascination – so much so that in September of the same year he decided to enrol in Denis Dufour’s electro-acoustic composition course at the Paris CRR. Since then he has been producing works for concert performance as well as installations combining music and visual art – his latest piece being “Confession”, created last December in Osaka.