Dialogue with Jean Nouvel

BY ANACHAR BASBOUS

What then if this genius is the father of a work that made us dream during our young student days in Paris?

This magical facade of the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), unequalled in modern architecture, this filter of light, this enchanting mechanism, this arabesque rooted in our Arab culture yet projected into the 21st century, still makes us dream.

The dream

This nocturnal visitor often transports us when the stars reveal themselves to us, yet this time the steel stars of this facade sparkle by day as much as by night.

My dream will begin by imagining the shapes of these stars escaping from these voids and landing on this space in a rigorous and respectful rhythm, each different from the other but all like offspring of the same father.

Sculptures of “stars” or rather “stardust”. This time these sculptures will have the same material as their matrix facade: they will be made out of steel.

I imagine a field of stars, of star-flowers, where the spectator can sidle between these alleys, and approach the starsculptures, touching them on a cosmic journey.

Let us dream that for a few days the celestial bodies will visit us at the bottom of this matrix façade, this star-making machine.

Meteorite sculpture

This is a mass of iron whose very structure suggests its vertiginous journey through space.

The circular elements that make up this meteorite-sculpture swirl and gravitate around each other.

The energy and dynamism created are only the reflection of its spatial journey. Its general shape is closer to a pebble, a shape that is curled, chiselled, polished by friction in the air.

It is a sculpture that evokes massiveness and dynamism, opacity and transparency, gravity and weightlessness.

It is an extra-terrestrial meteoritesculpture.

It is a mysterious object that comes to land on the forecourt of the IMA. It is a UFO which comes to appropriate a privileged place in front of this dream facade.

A crater

An impact

A shock

A trace

A trace is always related to time: the present, the past and often the future. It is emotion.

It touches us and becomes part of our being.

A creation, a joy, an encounter, a discovery are transformed into traces.

This crater would be this trace, this emotion transmitted by this place.