huiyu lan(a)                overall
 HUMPTY \ DUMPTY

The tranquil Palais de Tokyo at 10 pm enchanted me to enter a magnetic field of Humpty Dumpty. Its atmosphere was serene yet intimate; walking through the exhibition site triggered memories of lovers walking on an empty beach. A seemingly random pile of installations welcomed me at the entrance; it was Love Locks from Cyprien Gaillard.  Five sacks filled with freshly dismantled love locks from the bridge of the Pont des Art were murmuring the love and hate stories once they carried in their weights. Whatever journey they had taken and whoever’s hands locked them on the bridge, they are now rusted, no longer bearing the notions of eternity. Willowed, fleeting, mortal love.


                      
   




Humpty Dumpty examines architectural memories and traces, as well as the restoration and the reversal of time. Divided into two chapters, Humpty showcases at Palais de Tokyo, whereas Dumpty stages at Lafayette Anticipation, forming a quantum-alike entangled relationship between the two exhibition venues. Humpty stems from a physical perspective; it contests the relationship between time and space. In this section, Cyprien Gaillard’s Gargouille Crachat du Plomb and Daneil Turner’s Eiffel Cable Burnish underscore that time exists in objective matters. In Eiffel Cable Burnish, the traces are bluntly evident that everything can be forgotten, leaving only vague traces. It stands out from the gallery space, catching the audience’s attention from afar. Just as steel powder leaves traces on the wall, Gargouille Crachat du Plomb is deformed by corrosion and the fossilised shells hidden in the building materials, testifying to the passage of time with increasing entropy.

Dumpty is a philosophical echo of Humpty. It scrutinises how time is subjective, whereas historical memories can tamper with subjective consciousness. In this section, Cyprien Gaillard restored Le Défenseur Temps, which had stopped functioning due to a lack of funds. He re-polishes the clocks of his childhood memories, infusing them with new emotions as well as meanings: “I have an emotional relationship with architecture: a ruined building is for me comparable to the state in which one can find oneself at a given moment in the city, as the body is also a spatial fragment.” The presence of timekeepers is poeticised to protect time with the divine dragons (fire), crabs (sea), and birds (wind). Each symbolises a force of nature, and these elements defend time when the clocks point to a specific time.

     
Work by Daniel Turner

For the upcoming Olympics, Paris is painstakingly restoring historic buildings. People are obsessed with covering up the traces left by time. Curator Lamarche-Vadel and the artists continue the nursery rhyme story of Humpty Dumpty - about the breaking and saving of an egg - through installations, sculptures, paintings, and moving images.

The exhibition left the audiences to ponder the causal chain between architecture and life: Will people be upset by the disappearance or damage of architecture, just as their bodies are destroyed? Does architectural restoration assume the functionality of emotional restoration, and where is the commonality between the two? People have been trying to explore, think, save, heal, and even destroy the world from ancient times to the present. However, in a broader sense, the world continues to follow its original trajectory and speed, coming and going in the firmament, never moving. And people keep on remembering, and then forgetting, their transience in successive and active alterations.