Well known for his extreme artistic performances, Abraham Poincheval will repeat a claustrophobic experience, this time in a giant bottle installed on the banks of the Canal Saint-Denis, below the Stade de France. The artist will remain bottled for ten days, and will be released on the morning of August 3.
After collecting the bottle from his parents in Mayenne, Poincheval began his performance on Thursday, July 25, on the quays facing the Olympic stadium. The giant bottle is 6 meters long and 1.90 meters in diameter, perched on a small boat. Very rudimentary, the space was designed to be self-sufficient in water and food, and designed to allow the artist to live self-sufficiently during the 10 days of the performance.
A semblance of furniture, a makeshift bed and a dry toilet: the performer enjoys spartan comfort. With this performance, he intends to propose a form of poetic resistance to the frenzy of the Olympic Games through a praise of immobility. “The bottle, by its size, (…) disrupts the scale of the landscape and allows us to rediscover, to dream, a familiar territory”he explains.
The result of a public commission from Plaine Commune, a territorial public establishment (EPT) in Seine-Saint-Denis, the performance was co-produced by the Cneai= art center and Ilotopie. The bottle the artist slipped into had already been used in two previous performances: “Bottle”, on a beach in the Camargue in 2015, and “Grand Crue”, a journey up the Rhône in a bottle during the summer of 2016. In Saint-Denis, the artist’s journey will be motionless, the container placed on a floating plant carpet: initially conceived to travel along the Saint Denis canal, the performance ultimately remains at the quayside, as river traffic risks disrupting the navigation of the makeshift boat.
The giant bottle is part of the “Victoires”, a series of works intended to be eco-responsible, commissioned by the department to honor the Canal Saint-Denis during the Games. The performance is included in the calendar of the Cultural Olympiads, an artistic and cultural program piloted by Paris 2024 until September 8. Not far from La Bouteille by Abraham Poincheval, the works of the five other selected artists are presented: Charlotte Denamur, Mathieu Lorry Dupuy, Flora Moscovici, Victoria Klotz and Lucy+Jorge Orta.
The artist, an explorer and self-confessed “claustrophil”, is used to spectacular performances. His credits include (Dans la peau de) L’Ours, where he locked himself in a stuffed bear for thirteen days, and La Pierre, a mineral sarcophagus in which he confined himself for seven days at the Palais de Tokyo.
“Why a bottle in the canal? As water irrigates the territory, “the bottle in the sea” is an object of storytelling” explains the artist. While the story in question may seem as murky as the water in the canal, Abraham Poincheval details several narrative threads around this image, such as the exchanges between besieged people via the Canal Saint-Denis during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 or even Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes. To find out more, visit the banks of the Seine until August 3, where the artist will be able to answer the public’s questions through a system of pipes.
