Since 2012, FIAC has invited an artist to install a major artwork or to imagine a specific project for the Place Vendôme.This year FIAC gives carte blanche to American artist Oscar Tuazon to present an in-situ project to the scale of this prestigious Parisian square.
Sculpture is a hole in the world. Not an object but its absence, a void. A sculpture lacks life, needs you, it’s an emptiness you occupy.
Our world is water; make a sculpture for water, then. A pipe, a hole moving water through the earth, a passage from one place to another. Water is public space underground us. We need to go there, move through it ourselves, go inside the pipeline and live there. Sous le pavé, la pipeline.
Sur le pavé, la pipeline. On either side of the war memorial at the center of Place Vendôme, four sections of large diameter pipe are displayed above ground. Engineered for use in civic scale floodwater management and rainwater retention, the recycled thermoplastic pipes are an architecture of water made visible, un pavillon de l’eau évaporée, a horizontal water monument. This is a pipeline you can walk through, a pipeline for people.
Inside the pipes are tree trunks, cut from the Bois de Vincennes, installed in the interior of the pipelines. A tree is a biological indicator of the health of an ecosystem, record of the water we all depend on. Trees are solid water, live water. In the interior of the pipeline we are brought face to face with a tree, a non-human person.
— Oscar Tuazon
