Chambre des Échos : Le Bleu de toute chose

In response to the Palais de Tokyo season’s title, Tous les feux, les fleurs, la Chambre des échos presents three large-format reproductions from a collection of postcards depicting flowers. Ordinary images that graphic designer Charles Villa exhibited for several months under the sun’s rays. His ultraviolet rays gradually erased the most fragile pigments—the yellows, magentas, and fluorescent colors. Little by little, the flowers turned blue.

It is to this inexorable alteration of colors and things that Yto Barrada’s film, presented on the wall adjacent to the Palais de Tokyo, is attentive. The Power of Two or Three Suns (2020), a 16 mm short film, plunges us into a laboratory where the durability of textiles is tested by simulating the passage of time, thanks to a machine capable of reproducing the power of two or three suns.

The becoming blue of printed images recalls our own exposure to an environment that we helped to make hotter. Around this blue color unfolds a selection of books by Olivier Marboeuf, Imani Perry, Derek Jarman and Maggie Nelson, which take this color as a starting point—melancholic, erotic, haunted, luminous, evanescent, unstable, insondable; a surface of disappearance, a liquid space of memory and transmission.

Thus, this Chambre des échos gathers around the blue elements that do not always go together: an ocean, an obsessive love, a missing friend, an old advertisement, a sky or the traumatic memory of a dispersed family. They echo the thousands of anonymous images that have become blue, gathered by Charles Villa and laid out for you on the table. Everyone may leave with a blue image, but can also send one in turn, to compose this collective emotional matter made of a thousand kinds of blue.

The Chambre des échos is a space for programming and cultural mediation at the Palais de Tokyo. It offers exhibitions and events of varying scale and duration in the Palais de Tokyo’s free-entry area. It is conceived as a flexible and responsive space, inspired by the logic of cultural rights, which aims to recognize the right of every person or every group to participate in cultural life and to express their culture.