In Seas of Construction, photographer Manuel Alvarez Diestro documents urban development across China and South Korea through a visual study of construction sites. The photography series focuses on large-scale temporary coverings, green and blue fabrics draped over terrains, that serve both functional and aesthetic roles during the construction process. These coverings, typically used to stabilize soil and reduce dust, appear in the images as expansive, textile landscapes. Their vivid coloration and scale resemble the earthworks of 20th-century land art, transforming utilitarian materials into visual metaphors within the natural and built environment.

Photographed in remote or peripheral areas beyond city centers, the sites are often transitional spaces, landscapes caught between states of erasure and emergence. The fabric surfaces take on the appearance of abstract topographies or undulating seascapes, suggesting the anticipation of new urban forms beneath.

construction site in Seoul, South Korea | all images by Manuel Alvarez Diestro

Fabrics draped over construction sites resemble seascapes

The Seas of Construction series first started taking form on Hainan Island, where photographer Manuel Alvarez Diestro noticed fabric laid across construction sites near palm trees resembled ocean waves, drawing parallels with travel calendars featuring idyllic tropical coasts. From this point, the visual metaphor of a ‘sea of construction’ began to define the conceptual lens through which the work evolved.

In recontextualizing these temporary interventions, the series presents a reinterpretation of the built environment and the materials that shape it. The photographs invite viewers to consider how urban growth is not only a structural process, but also a visual and symbolic one, where fabric becomes a medium of transformation.

construction debris covered with green fabric in Seoul, South Korea

green fabric covering land in Hainan, China

construction site in Seoul, South Korea

construction site in Seoul, South Korea

Blue fabric covering land against new residential towers in China

construction site in Shanghai, China

sea of green fabric in Seoul, South Korea

a vast territory covered with green and blue fabric in China

Jeju Island, South Korea

green fabric surrounds new towers in Beijing, China

mountains of stones covered with black fabric in Incheon, South Korea

project info:

name: Seas of Construction

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A collaborative project between contemporary artist Jacky Tsai and Chinese aerospace company LandSpace has resulted in the successful launch of the world’s first fully art-painted orbital rocket. The Zhuque-2 Enhanced (ZQ-2E Y2), measuring nearly 50 meters in height, was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China and crossed the Kármán line, officially entering outer space. 

This marks the first instance of a complete rocket body being treated as a unified visual artwork and deployed in a successful space mission. The design, themed around the Chinese legend ‘Chang’e Flying to the Moon,’ features continuous painted compositions depicting Chang’e, the moon palace, and celestial figures. These elements were executed using aerospace-grade paints and techniques, developed in close coordination between the artist and engineering teams. Jacky Tsai reimagined the myth through bold visual language and vibrant colors, blending Eastern narrative with contemporary aesthetics.

all images courtesy of Jacky Tsai

Jacky Tsai applies aerospace-grade paint across the entire rocket

Unlike prior examples of decorative treatments or mission insignia applied to rockets, this project involved a fully integrated surface design across the entire launch vehicle. This unprecedented initiative presented both technical and visual challenges. To realize the vision, artist Jacky Tsai worked closely with engineers to apply aerospace-grade paint and advanced production methods, ensuring the artwork remained vivid and intact under extreme launch conditions. ‘To witness my artwork launched into space on a real rocket is one of the most emotional moments of my career. Through this project, I hope to send our shared dreams and imagination truly into the cosmos,’ Tsai said.

Segments of the painted rocket body were recovered post-launch following stage separation, serving as tangible evidence of this pioneering art experiment. The project stands as a formal and material intersection between visual art and aerospace technology. This launch represents a new point of convergence between creative disciplines and space exploration, expanding the framework through which rockets may be viewed not only as engineering systems but also as cultural artifacts.

Jacky Tsai’s artwork transforms the entire rocket surface

artist Jacky Tsai worked closely with engineers to realize the surface design

continuous painted compositions span the rocket’s full height

aerospace-grade paint remained vivid and intact under extreme launch conditions

the first art-painted vehicle entering outer space

project info:

name: the world’s first fully artist-painted rocket
designer: Jacky Tsai | @jackytsaiart

company: LandSpace

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‘100 colors no.53,’ the latest installment in Emmanuelle Moureaux’s ongoing ‘100 colors path’ series, has opened at Takanawa Gateway City in Tokyo. Composed of 2,400 vertical lines, each rendered in one of 100 precisely selected colors, the work is both a spatial structure and a temporal map, charting a century’s worth of imagined futures.

The piece is installed in the newly developed Gateway Park by East Japan Railway Company, and marks the launch of Takanawa Gateway City, an urban complex built around a central transport hub in Minato Ward. As the first public installation unveiled with the complex’s debut, ‘100 colors path’ sets the tone for a neighborhood defined by openness and movement. ‘100 colors no. 53’ will be open to the public until July 21st, 2025.

images © Daisuke Shima

emmanuelle moureaux’s map of Color and Time

While Emmanuelle Moureaux’s ‘100 colors no.53,’ reads as a shifting gradient from across the Tokyo plaza, its internal logic is revealed up close as an accumulation of numbers layered within a calibrated spectrum. This way, the Tokyo-based French architect‘s characteristic use of color is an architectural material rather than surface treatment. Each line is inscribed with a year, beginning in 2025 and continuing sequentially through 2124.

The structural rhythm of the work is defined by uniform spacing and repetition. Lines are suspended vertically to create a passage that is simultaneously transparent and immersive. The numbers printed on the lines come in and out of view as visitors move through the piece, a kinetic effect heightened by the optical interference patterns of overlapping colors.

Emmanuelle Moureaux installs ‘100 colors path’ in Tokyo’s Takanawa Gateway City

a pathway carved through immersive color

At the heart of Tokyo’s ‘100 colors path’ installation is a central corridor which cuts through the colored grid. Emmanuelle Moureaux carves this passage to invite entry, allowing visitors to become momentarily absorbed in the spectrum of time. As people walk through the corridor, the visual rhythm shifts with their movement. It is a simple gesture, but one that transforms the installation from an object to inhabit into an environment to experience.

Inside, the work offers a tactile proximity to each color and year. The vertical density flattens at certain angles and deepens at others, underscoring the relationship between time and space in architectural perception. The effect is neither theatrical nor didactic — it is precise, open-ended, and responsive to movement.

the installation consists of 2,400 vertical lines arranged in 100 precisely selected colors

Beyond the park installation, the concept of ‘100 colors path’ has been extended throughout the station district. Moureaux designed related graphics for both north and south ticket gates of Takanawa Gateway Station, as well as the surrounding street flags. A complementary augmented reality experience titled 100 colors city allows visitors to engage with the installation digitally, activating the concept through smartphone interaction.

During the exhibition period, a public workshop invited participants to search for color in their everyday surroundings — an approach that reinforces the project’s central theme of color as a framework for observation and time. This alignment between physical installation and public programming strengthens the architectural relevance of the work in its urban setting.

a central corridor invites visitors to walk through the immersive color field

Moureaux’s 100 colors path continues her exploration of how color can be used to shape physical space and collective imagination. The numbering of each line, paired with a clear chronological arc, gives structure to what could otherwise be a purely aesthetic field. This linking of color and time brings a conceptual framework that is visually inviting, but also conceptually complex.

The installation references both the future and the present. The decision to begin during Takanawa Gateway City’s inaugural year of 2025 grounds the piece in its immediate context. Meanwhile, the choice to extend one hundred years forward transforms the project into a durational meditation on memory and urban growth.

each line is engraved with a year from 2025 to 2124, creating a spatial timeline of 100 years

the numbers appear and disappear as viewers move for a dynamic, perspective-led experience

an AR extension called ‘100 colors city’ invites digital interaction via smartphones

the installation uses color as an architectural material to organize time and space

project info:

name: 100 colors no.53 ‘100 colors path’

architect: Emmanuelle Moureaux | @emmanuellemoureaux

location: Gateway Park, Takanawa Gateway City, Tokyo, Japan

on view: March 27th — July 21st, 2025

photography: © Daisuke Shima | @daisuke_shima_photography

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Anna & Eugeni Bach completes Crown of Eyes, an installation hovering six meters above the central hall of Barcelona’s Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC). The twelve-meter-wide, celestial blue ring is suspended as a contemporary tribute to Francesc d’Assís Galí (1880–1965), one of Catalonia’s most visionary artists, the painter and educator behind the monumental dome murals of the Palau Nacional. The project forms the centerpiece of MNAC’s expansive exhibition on Galí, revealing his wide-ranging legacy as a painter, pedagogue, and exile whose influence rippled through generations, from Joan Miró to Llorens Artigas.

all images © Eugeni Bach

sixteen medallions shape a crown of eyes

Galí’s murals, painted over six months while perched on a fragile structure thirty meters high, crown the Palau’s great dome with 35 allegorical figures that fuse fine arts, science, religion, and earth into a cosmic fresco. Beyond his work as a muralist, Galí was also a radical educator. During the Noucentisme movement, he transformed art instruction through his Escola d’Art, urging students to look at the world differently. One of his mantras was to bring no tools to the field, only ‘a crown of eyes’ to observe nature. This pedagogical idea becomes the poetic seed of the structure by the Barcelona-based duo Anna & Eugeni Bach.

Floating towards the dome, where the eye naturally drifts, the Crown of Eyes anchors viewers between earth and sky. Sixteen medallions are embedded in its circumference, evoking the supporting columns of the dome and Galí’s ever-watchful metaphor. Rendered in a deep, radiant blue, the installation mirrors the color of the dome’s apex, inviting visitors to scan the murals with curiosity and intent, as Galí once taught his students to scan the Montseny Mountains.

Crown of Eyes is a spatial conversation with history, created in collaboration with architects Artur Muñoz and Virginia Mars and supported by Roger Molas, Claudia Senovilla, and engineers from Best and BetArq.

Anna & Eugeni Bach’s Crown of Eyes hovers six meters above the central hall of MNAC

UNCOVERING THE INVISIBLE

While Crown of Eyes floats in the central space of the museum, MNAC’s exhibition ventures deeper into Francesc d’Assís Galí’s expansive life and legacy. Often working behind the scenes, Galí helped shape the very foundations of Catalan modernity, yet he remained deliberately invisible, prioritizing teaching over personal fame and leaving little trace of his own ambitions. This curatorial effort makes visible what he preferred hidden, reclaiming his role as a key cultural agent of the early 20th century. From his mentorship of Joan Miró and Llorens Artigas to his directorial leadership at the Escola de Bells Oficis and the 1929 International Exposition, Galí emerges as a figure who consistently moved the needle while stepping out of the frame.

His most visible artistic legacy remains the dome of the Palau Nacional, painted with 35 allegorical figures over a grueling half-year suspended on high scaffolding. But the show also highlights his broader work as a painter, draftsman, muralist, and poster artist, tracing a career that moved fluidly through modernism, symbolism, noucentisme, and the avant-garde. A parallel exhibition, Galí: Exile and Evasion, at the Museum of Exile (MuME) in La Jonquera, reconstructs his abrupt departure from Spain during the Civil War and the ten years he spent in London. There, his relationship with surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun introduced new ideas and directions into his later work. Together, the two exhibitions finally position Galí not only as a bridge between movements but as a vital thread in the cultural and political fabric of Catalonia.

the twelve-meter-wide, celestial blue ring is suspended like a phantom scaffold

a contemporary tribute to Francesc d’Assís Galí

the project forms the centerpiece of MNAC’s expansive exhibition on Galí

Galí’s murals crown the Palau’s great dome with 35 allegorical figures

the Crown of Eyes anchors viewers between earth and sky

rendered in a deep, radiant blue, the installation mirrors the color of the dome’s apex

sixteen medallions are embedded in the circumference of the artwork

project info:

name: Crown of Eyes

artist: Anna & Eugeni Bach | @eugenibach, @anna_k_bach

location: Palau Nacional, Barcelona, Spain

design team: Artur Muñoz, Virginia Mars

collaborators: Roger Molas, Claudia Senovilla (architects); Nacho Costales / Best (structural engineer); Ramon Cisa / BetArq (quantity surveyor)

comissioner: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) | @museunacional

photographer: © Eugeni Bach

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Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives transforms the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens into a stage for over 60 international artists grappling with one of the most urgent ethical questions of our time: how do we live with, and not over, animals? 

Running until January 7th, 2026, the museum-wide show spans five floors, combining visual art, science, philosophy, and activism to challenge speciesism and advocate for animal rights, sentience, and voice. ‘At its core, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is an attempt to shift our gaze from a purely anthropocentric worldview to one that recognises the rights, agency, and suffering of non-human beings.’ Katerina Gregos, curator of the exhibition and EMST’s creative director, explains, speaking with designboom. Inspired by John Berger’s seminal 1980 essay, Why Look at Animals? underscores the notion of ‘listening beyond language.’ It implicitly strives to ‘speak for those who have no voice,’ as the curator frames it, a driving force that shaped the entire process.

from left to right: Mark Dion, Men and Game, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Los Angeles | Rossella Biscotti, Clara, 2016. Courtesy of the artist | all installation view images by Paris Tavitian, unless stated otherwise

listening beyond language: art as a site for interspecies empathy

The curatorial framework by the art historian Katerina Gregos pierces through the anthropocentric lens that has rendered animals invisible, both culturally and ecologically. ‘I’ve always felt the subject of animal rights and well–being to be an urgent one, and was puzzled how the so-called ‘art world’ did not consider it worthy of attention until very recently,’ she shares with designboom. Far from romanticising nature, the show boldly confronts the systems that exploit animal life: industrial farming, vivisection, the exotic pet trade, hunting, and entertainment. Works on view make visible the brutal disconnections of modernity, where animals have been relegated from myth, companion, and co-inhabitant to product and spectacle. Berger’s claim that animals have ‘disappeared’ from daily life is literal here – their erasure becomes the focal point of critical reflection and creative resistance.

While rooted in ethics, Why Look at Animals? also delves into science, drawing on neuroethology and animal studies to dismantle outdated ideas like Descartes’ bête-machine, the animal as automaton. ‘I’ve long been concerned with questions of injustice and inequality, particularly within the human sphere,’ Gregos tells us, adding that she ‘realised early on that they are sentient, intelligent beings who are disadvantaged in our world because they do not possess speech.’ Visitors are prompted to engage with animals as complex beings with emotional lives, intelligence, and social structures that may differ from human norms but are no less profound. Texts by thinkers like Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Regan shape the theoretical spine of the exhibition, bringing together philosophical, legal, and environmental dimensions of animal advocacy. ‘This systemic disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals mirrors a broader ethical and ecological rupture, one that the exhibition at EMST seeks to confront,’ insists Gregos. In a world where animals are often framed as voiceless, this show turns up the volume, demanding a reconfiguration of how we think and live. Dive into our in-depth discussion with Katerina Gregos below.

Nikos Tranos, Terrain (bridle for horses), 2024. courtesy of the artist and Zoumboulakis Galleries, Athens | Jonas Staal, Exo-Ecologies, 2023. Commissioned by Power Station of Art l 14th Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist

INTERVIEW WITH KATERINA GREGOS

designboom (DB): How did John Berger’s 1980 essay shape your vision for this exhibition? Are there particular passages or ideas from the text that served as a curatorial compass? 

Katerina Gregos (KG): The title of the exhibition is drawn directly from John Berger’s seminal 1980 essay Why Look at Animals?, which was both a starting point and a conceptual anchor for the project. Berger’s reflections on the estrangement of humans from animals resonated deeply with me and informed my curatorial explorations. He begins his essay by highlighting the important role that animals played in human societies; ‘The animals first entered the human imagination as messengers and promises’ he writes, thus acknowledging the deep symbolic and spiritual role animals once played in human cultures. However, he goes on to point out a sea change in the relationship between humans and animals during modernity, highlighting the fact that ‘In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared.’ This is a reference not only to extinction or physical absence but to their cultural and symbolic disappearance from human life. ‘Everywhere animals disappear’ he emphasizes, ‘In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.’ This is a striking statement on how animals have been marginalized and isolated in modern society, especially through artificial settings like zoos or circuses where they have been reduced to a spectacle or commodity – confined to manmade spaces, such as theme parks, factory farms, and, ultimately, to the abstraction of the supermarket shelf.

This systemic disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals mirrors a broader ethical and ecological rupture, one that the exhibition at EMST seeks to confront. Berger’s idea that animals have ‘lost their centrality’ in the human imagination helped shape the curatorial vision, which does not aim to romanticise animals or nature, but rather to challenge the mechanisms – economic, cultural, and visual – through which non-human lives have been rendered invisible, disposable, or instrumentalised. The book serves as the basis for the exhibition’s ethico-philosophical approach to non-human lives, and its plea for a consideration of animal rights. It is in this spirit that Why Look at Animals? becomes not only a question, but a provocation, one that urges viewers to reconsider how we see, relate to, and live with other species.

front to back: Maarten Vanden Eynde Homo stupidus stupidus, 2008. Private collection, Slovenia | Nabil Boutros, Celebrities / Ovine Condition, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

DB: What was the most challenging aspect of curating an exhibition that seeks to raise awareness and advocate for the moral and legal consideration of non-human life?

KG: One of the most challenging aspects was finding the right balance between raising awareness and fostering critical reflection – without falling into didacticism or moralising or the trappings of simplistic agit-prop art. Art is not activism in the traditional sense; its strength lies in its ability to open up space for nuanced thinking, emotional engagement, and deeper contemplation. But when dealing with such an urgent and ethically charged subject as the rights of non-human life, the line between aesthetics, advocacy, and information is a delicate one. Another challenge was how to sensitively represent the often invisible or marginalised suffering of animals, especially those not typically granted empathy – such as lab animals, factory-farmed creatures, or those displaced by environmental destruction. How do you visualise their realities without sensationalising or exploiting their pain? How do you speak for those who have no voice? These were questions I constantly grappled with. That is why there are no taxidermied animals in the exhibition, or scenes of graphic violence.

On a practical level, assembling a constellation of works that reflected a diversity of voices, geographies, and cultural understandings of human-animal relationships was vital. It was important to resist a Western-centric narrative and instead draw attention to plural worldviews – particularly Indigenous, postcolonial, or non-Western perspectives – that often hold a much more holistic understanding of interspecies coexistence. Ultimately, the challenge was to curate an exhibition that doesn’t offer easy answers, but rather provokes questions – about ethics, responsibility, and our place in the wider web of life. I hope that Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives can contribute to a broader shift in consciousness and policy, while also encouraging a personal reckoning about the assumptions we have.

front to back: Maarten Vanden Eynde Homo stupidus stupidus, 2008. Private collection, Slovenia | Nabil Boutros, Celebrities / Ovine Condition, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

DB: How does the exhibition address our uneven empathy toward animals, especially those typically overlooked or excluded?

KG: The exhibition aims to challenge the hierarchy of empathy that governs our relationships with non-human animals – where certain species are cherished, while others are ignored, commodified, or exploited without a second thought. At its core is the recognition that all forms of life are interconnected, and that our survival is deeply dependent on the well-being of the ecosystems and species with whom we share this planet. Despite having histories marked by colonialism, fascism, and struggles for independence – oppressions that should have sensitised us to injustice – we continue to uphold a deeply anthropocentric worldview. We presume human superiority over other species, often failing to acknowledge the moral and ecological consequences of that belief. This mindset not only leads to the suffering of non-human lives but positions us as one of the few species capable of destroying its own habitat.

Through Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives, I hope to provoke a deeper reflection on these contradictions, and encourage viewers to reconsider the ways in which empathy is selectively applied. By bringing to light the lives and perspectives of animals we rarely think about – from those used in testing or factory farming to those displaced by extractivist practices – the exhibition seeks to foster a more just and inclusive understanding of coexistence. Empathy must be extended beyond the familiar and the lovable, to include all those whose lives are intertwined with ours – often invisibly.

the museum-wide show advocates for animal rights, sentience, and voice | image © designboom

DB: With artists from over 30 countries, how did you make sure the exhibition reflects culturally diverse understandings of human-animal relationships rather than a Western-centric view?

KG: From its inception, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives was conceived not as a Western-centric exhibition about animals in art, but as a critical, ethical, and culturally expansive exploration of human-animal relationships across different regions, histories, and worldviews. One of EMST’s core commitments is to challenge the dominant narratives that often shape large-scale exhibitions, particularly those rooted in a Western canon. In line with the museum’s mission to explore ‘creative memory practices’ and resist presentism and amnesia, the curatorial approach deliberately sought out artists whose practices are embedded in culturally specific, historically layered, and often marginalised understandings of non-human life.

The exhibition features over 200 works by 60 artists from more than 30 countries across four continents, many of whom engage with non-Western cosmologies, Indigenous perspectives, and postcolonial critiques of human exceptionalism. This diversity was not incidental – it reflects the museum’s broader aim to foreground multiple, often contradictory, ways of understanding the world, particularly those shaped by colonial histories, forced industrialisation, ecological degradation, and ongoing systems of exploitation. Moreover, EMST’s position in Athens – as a city at the intersection of Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa – offers a unique vantage point from which to question binary worldviews. Greece itself has a hybrid identity shaped by Eastern, Levantine, and Western influences, and the museum draws on this complexity to amplify voices and narratives that sit outside of dominant curatorial models. In this sense, Why Look at Animals? is not only about animals, but also about how different cultures relate to the living world – how they remember, mythologise, commodify, mourn, or coexist with it. It is about making space for those understandings that have been excluded or undervalued, and about using contemporary art to surface new ethical relationships with more-than-human life.

Oussama Tabti, Homo-Carduelis, 2022 (installation view), Sound installation, Bird cages, speakers, 33’ (loop), Dimensions variable, Collection of EMST

DB: Do you see this exhibition as the beginning of a larger movement within contemporary art to address the rights of non-human beings? What role should artists and institutions play going forward?

KG: Yes, I believe this exhibition is part of a growing and necessary shift in contemporary art – one that seeks to dismantle anthropocentric worldviews and take seriously the rights, experiences, and agency of non-human beings. While this conversation has existed in philosophy, science, and activism for some time, contemporary art is now increasingly engaging with it in ways that are visceral, imaginative, and politically urgent. Art has a unique capacity to visualise the invisible, to make felt what is often ignored, and to propose new modes of thinking and relating. Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives contributes to a wider re-evaluation of how humans coexist with the more-than-human world – by foregrounding the ethical, emotional, and ecological dimensions of that relationship. The exhibition does not claim to provide definitive answers, but rather opens up a space for questioning, witnessing, and empathising – urging us to reconsider our own fraught and conflicted relationship with animals.

Going forward, artists and institutions alike have a responsibility to foster this kind of critical dialogue. For institutions, that means programming that reflects ecological urgency, supporting transdisciplinary approaches, and ensuring that diverse cultural perspectives on non-human life are represented – not just those rooted in Western scientific or philosophical frameworks. For artists, it means continuing to challenge dominant narratives, creating work that highlights urgent issues and how we understand them and using their practices to imagine more equitable multispecies futures. If there is a movement underway, it must also be an ethical one – grounded in care, accountability, and an openness to learn from other ways of being. The museum can – and must – be a place where such reorientations can begin.

visitors are prompted to engage with animals as complex beings with emotional lives | image © designboom

DB: In working on this project, did your personal relationship with animals or views on speciesism evolve in ways you didn’t expect?

KG: Curating Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives has been both a professional and deeply personal journey. I’ve long been concerned with questions of injustice and inequality, particularly within the human sphere. But I’ve also grown up with many different animals, living side by side with them, and realised early on that they are sentient, intelligent beings who are disadvantaged in our world because they do not possess speech. I’ve always felt the subject of animal rights and well–being to be an urgent one, and was puzzled how the so-called ‘art world’ did not consider it worthy of attention until very recently. Working closely on this exhibition, immersing myself in the vast and often disturbing realities of human-animal relationships, made me confront more viscerally the structural violence and moral blind spots that underpin speciesism.

What surprised me was not so much a change of heart – I have always felt that the way humans treat animals is profoundly problematic – but rather a sharpening of perspective, an expanded sense of urgency given the ecological crisis, in which animals are the invisible victims. The research forced me to confront the sheer scale and normalisation of cruelty towards non-human lives, often hidden in plain sight. I realised just how embedded this hierarchy is in our culture and how difficult it is to disentangle ourselves from it, even when we try. The exhibition also made me reflect more consciously on the idea of co-existence – not as an abstract ideal, but as a necessary ethical imperative. It’s no longer enough to think of animals as beings we must protect out of compassion. We must start acknowledging them as subjects with agency, presence, and rights, as lives that matter in and of themselves, not just in relation to us. This shift, I believe, is one that artists and cultural institutions must support. We have to help recalibrate the ethical lens through which we look at the world, to open up space for imagining new forms of kinship and solidarity across species.

Lynn Hershman Leeson The Infinity Engine, 2014 (detail) Multimedia installation, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel, San Francisco and Bridget Donahue, New York

DB: What kind of emotional or intellectual response do you hope to evoke in viewers?

KG: The exhibition confronts a range of exploitative and often invisible forms of violence against animals – whether through scientific testing, space exploration, genetic engineering, hunting, or habitat destruction driven by extractivist and industrial agricultural practices. At its core, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is an attempt to shift our gaze from a purely anthropocentric worldview to one that recognises the rights, agency, and suffering of non-human beings. I hope the show elicits both an emotional and intellectual response: empathy, reflection, discomfort, perhaps even outrage – but also a deeper understanding of the structural and ethical failures that underpin our relationship with the non-human world.

The goal is not to provoke guilt, but to awaken awareness and a sense of shared responsibility, and an impetus to change our habits (to meat, for example). By inviting viewers to confront the systemic ways in which human actions harm animal lives and degrade shared ecosystems, Why Look at Animals? aims to build a compelling case for reimagining how we cohabit the planet. The destruction we inflict on non-human life is ultimately a form of self-harm – an expression of greed, moral failure, and a profound inability to coexist with what is simply other than ourselves. If this project can spark meaningful dialogue, raise awareness beyond the art world, and contribute even incrementally to changing attitudes or policy, that would already be a powerful outcome.

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Taxonomic Trophies, 2005 – ongoing (detail)
Branches, wood and metal name tags
Dimensions variable 
Courtesy of the artist

Gustafsson & Haapoja Embrace Your Empathy, 2016/2025 (installation view) Installation, 20 Flags Dimensions variable Co-commissioned by EMSΤ Courtesy of the artists

Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, Comrades in Extinction, 2020 – 2021 (installation view, detail), installation with wood, hardened oil landscape and gouache paintings. Dimensions variable, Production by EMST. Courtesy of Studio Jonas Staal

the show boldly confronts the systems that exploit animal life | image © designboom

Paris Petridis Lagia, 2001; Imathia, 2006; Thessaloniki, 2021; Galilee, 2011; Dead Sea, 2012. Courtesy of the artist

(from left to right): Marcus Coates, Extinct Animals, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London | Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, hello, are we in the show?, 2012. Collection S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent | Anne Marie Maes, Glossa (bee tongue), 2024.

Marcus Coates Extinct Animals, 2018 (installation view, detail) Group of 19 casts, plaster Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London| image © designboom

project info:

name: Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives

curator: Katerina Gregos | @katerina.gregos

venue: EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art | @emstathens, Athens, Greece

exhibition design: Flux Office | @flux_office

dates: May 15th, 2025 – January 7th, 2026

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Long daylight pavilion, a new permanent public artwork by Olafur Eliasson has been unveiled along the rocky waterfront of eastern Helsinki‘s Kruunuvuorenranta district. The site-specific installation functions as both an architectural intervention and a celestial marker, aligning precisely with the arc of the sun on the summer solstice.

Located at the edge of Wiirinkallio, the work marks a significant moment for the city’s commitment to public art, and for Eliasson, whose practice frequently engages with light, geometry, and human perception. The project is part of the City of Helsinki and HAM Helsinki Art Museum’s ongoing efforts to integrate contemporary art into the urban fabric. The unveiling of the Long daylight pavilion coincides with the opening of Helsinki Biennial, where another work by Olafur Eliasson, Viewing machine, will be on view on nearby Vallisaari Island.

Olafur Eliasson, Long daylight pavilion, 2025, installation view: Kruunuvuorenranta, Helsinki, Finland. photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen. commissioned by: City of Helsinki

Spatial Orientation and Material Precision

Olafur Eliasson’s Long daylight pavilion is made up of twenty-four steel poles. This circular array emerges from the exposed bedrock and stretches outward in a ring, partially extending over the water. The arrangement is carefully calibrated by the artist so that each pole corresponds to a moment in the sun’s path on June 21st, the longest day of the year in Finland. Their varying heights allow the viewer to read the solstice’s geometry through the structure itself. The lowest point, located to the north, and the highest, oriented southward, trace the arc of daylight as it would be experienced from this particular site.

Embedded directly into the granite shoreline, the poles appear grounded and deliberate. As the sun shifts overhead, shadows travel across the circular formation, introducing a quiet sense of movement. Though fixed, the work invites a sense of temporal awareness, linking visitors to the rhythm of the Earth’s rotation. The pavilion’s opening during the June 8th start to the Helsinki Biennial means that it will be on view in time for this month’s upcoming solstice.

Olafur Eliasson, Long daylight pavilion, 2025, installation view: Kruunuvuorenranta, Helsinki, Finland. photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen. commissioned by: City of Helsinki

Light as a Tool for Navigation

While the Long daylight pavilion is tied to a specific moment in the year, it is designed by Olafur Eliasson to transform across time and conditions. After dark, integrated lanterns emit a constellation of light through diamond-shaped openings near the top of each pole. These apertures widen incrementally, culminating in concentrated beams that form a luminous, angled ring.

Seen from a distance, especially from the direction of Central Helsinki, the pavilion presents as a beacon. Its visual orientation toward the city allows it to act as a marker on the horizon. ‘I hope that it will rapidly become an attractive destination for residents of the neighbourhood, connecting them to the world by gesturing to the path of the sun at this location,’ says Olafur Eliasson. ‘And for those viewing it from the city as a bright light across the water, I hope that it offers a point of orientation on their horizon.’

Olafur Eliasson, Long daylight pavilion, 2025, installation view: Kruunuvuorenranta, Helsinki, Finland. photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen. commissioned by: City of Helsinki

‘viewing machine’ arrives to Vallisaari Island

Also installed for the Helsinki Biennial, Viewing Machine (2001) invites visitors to engage with Vallisaari Island through a faceted lens. The hexagonal structure operates like a functional kaleidoscope, with angled mirrors that fragment and reflect whatever lies in view. Unlike Long daylight pavilion, which anchors perception in celestial alignment, Viewing Machine offers a shifting, participant-driven perspective. By rotating the device and selecting their own vantage point, viewers experience a layered visual field shaped by both the geometry of the object and the motion of their gaze. 

Olafur Eliasson at the Long daylight pavilion inauguration | image courtesy Embassy of Iceland in Helsinki

Kruunuvuorenranta is being shaped into Helsinki’s district of light art, and the addition of Long daylight pavilion establishes a focal point along the shoreline. The installation complements the area’s transformation from former oil depot into a residential zone with a growing network of cultural interventions.

Deputy Mayor for Culture and Leisure, Paavo Arhinmäki, describes a personal connection to the piece: ‘I’ve been watching the work take shape by the shore during my morning commute and have already gone to admire it after dark.’ His remarks reinforce the idea that Eliasson’s work is intended to function not only as public art but as an accessible and monumental part of daily life.

Olafur Eliasson, Viewing Machine, 2001/2003, image courtesy Studio Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson, Viewing Machine, 2001/2003, image courtesy Studio Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson, Viewing Machine, 2001/2003, image courtesy Studio Olafur Eliasson

project info:

name: Long daylight pavilion

artist: Olafur Eliasson | @studioolafureliasson

location: Kruunuvuorenranta, Helsinki, Finland

event: Helsinki Biennial | @helsinkibiennial

collaborator: HAM Helsinki Art Museum | @hamhelsinki

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From June 16 to 22, 2025, Basel becomes home to the inaugural edition of Digital Art Mile— a new and ambitious initiative by ArtMeta that transforms the historic Rebgasse district into a vibrant epicenter for digital creativity. This week-long event runs in parallel with Art Basel and offers a curated alternative that addresses a conspicuous absence: digital art. Spread across Space25, the 4th Floor, and Kult.Kino Cinema, the fair gathers an international network of artists, curators, collectors, and technologists to explore how digital media reshapes the canon of contemporary art. With exhibitions, robotic installations, and conferences led by global voices in art and culture, Digital Art Mile invites both industry professionals and curious publics to rethink the boundaries of art in a digital age.

For first-time visitors, Digital Art Mile offers a paradigm shift. From interactive to historically rich displays, the fair seeks to challenge preconceptions. ArtMeta seeks to convince the skeptics that digital art isn’t just about speculation and NFTs— it’s about a rich, evolving art form rooted in dialogue and human imagination.

From June 16 to 22, 2025, Basel becomes home to the inaugural edition of Digital Art Mile | all images courtesy of ArtMeta

the fair introduces the digital art mile 

ArtMeta, co-founded by curator and digital art pioneer Georg Bak and digital entrepreneur Roger Haas, is carving out a distinct path for how digital art is experienced, understood, and collected. The platform originally emerged from their mutual desire to elevate digital art beyond novelty, rooting it instead within a broader historical and cultural narrative.

For its 2025 Basel edition, ArtMeta introduces the Digital Art Mile, conceived as a boutique fair with curated exhibitions and educational programming. Unlike conventional commercial events, its focus lies in thematic cohesion and historical dialogue, linking the legacy of early digital pioneers to the cutting edge of blockchain, AI, and Web3. Through its growing curatorial reach, ArtMeta positions itself as an anchor point in the evolving landscape of digital-native cultural production.

Hackatao – PAINTBOX – Primitives (2025)

artists, curators, collectors, and technologists all meet in basel

Digital Art Mile 2025 offers an immersive entry point into the pluralistic worlds of digital art, from generative image-making and robotics to blockchain-based collecting and AI-driven creativity. This edition’s programming explores intersections between human expression and machine logic, between analog legacy and virtual futures. Beyond exhibitions, the fair includes a four-day conference series at Kult.Kino Cinema that brings together leading thinkers such as Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum), Ian Charles Stewart (Toledo Museum Labs), Sebastien Borget (The Sandbox), and Prof. Dr. Thomas Girst (BMW). Through these multi-perspective discussions, the fair aims not only to showcase the state of digital art but also to create frameworks for its institutional integration, economic viability, and cultural resonance.

Bryan Brinkman in the studio of Adrian Wilson

Bryan Brinkman – Love Bytes (2025)

A central highlight at Rebgasse 25 is the ‘Paintboxed’ exhibition, a landmark collaboration between ArtMeta, Objkt, and the Tezos Foundation. It resurrects the Quantel Paintbox, a pioneering digital painting tool from the 1980s, celebrated for its pivotal role in transforming visual culture—from MTV graphics to the iconic posters of ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘The Silence of the Lambs.’ Paintboxed positions this forgotten chapter of digital history in conversation with the present.

Artists including Justin Aversano, Grant Yun, Ivona Tau, Hackatao, and Simon Denny were invited to create new works using one of the few remaining functional Paintboxes. Tau even collaborated with ChatGPT to receive step-by-step generative painting instructions, blurring the boundaries between human intuition and AI guidance. These new creations are displayed in lightboxes and paired with NFTs minted on the Tezos Foundation blockchain, allowing collectors to own dual manifestations of the same work—both analog and digital.

Sabato Visconti – Mecha Rosie (2025)

Coldie, Keith Haring – Decentral Eyes (2025)

Located at Rebgasse 31, the 4th Floor reimagines a former warehouse as a future-forward gallery ecosystem, hosting some of the most experimental names in the space. Objkt.com presents ‘We Emotional Cyborgs: On Avatars and AI Agents,’ curated by Anika Meier—a provocative exploration of virtual identity and post-human aesthetics. Robotic artworks take center stage in Bright Moments’ ‘Automata,’ which includes autonomous painting machines creating works in real-time. Historic pioneers such as Waldemar Cordeiro, Manfred Mohr, and Joan Truckenbrod are spotlighted by Mayor Gallery, RCM, and Galerie Charlot, positioning digital art within a longer, often overlooked lineage.

Other participants include The Sigg Art Foundation, Cypherdudes, LaCollection, and Sarasin Foundation, each offering unique vignettes into contemporary crypto culture. A lounge hosted by Tezos Foundation offers a space to engage with the underlying technology.

Exhibition view 2024 – Aleksandra Jovanovic 2 (2025)

Digital Art Mile expands its cultural footprint with a robust conference series held at Kult.Kino Cinema on June 17 and 18. The talks tackle vital topics such as the role of digital art in museums, the evolution of AI-generated creativity, and how corporations are adopting NFTs and digital aesthetics into their branding and storytelling. Notable sessions include ‘Digital Art in Museums’ featuring Christiane Paul and Ian Charles Stewart, and ‘Digital Art in Corporations,’ moderated by designboom, with insights from BMW’s Prof. Dr. Thomas Girst and Sandbox’s Sebastien Borget. According to Bak, these sessions aim to close the gap between the institutional canonization of digital art and the vibrant discourse happening on social media. A particular point of interest is the integration of crypto culture in legacy institutions and how corporate players like UBS, Arab Bank, and luxury brands are shaping their own digital art narratives.

By building a space where curated exhibitions meet educational discourse, the fair aspires to become the leading marketplace and forum for digital art worldwide. Looking ahead, ArtMeta plans to expand its editorial output and continue fostering deeper conversations across cities and continents.

Adrian Wilson – Team For Hair 1985

Kiki Picasso, Fondateur de Quantel – Peter Michael par Kiki Picasso (2025)

Adrian Wilson – GPB Collage 1986

OMGiDRAWEDit, So Revival, 2025

project info:

name: Digital Art Mile
organization: ArtMeta | @artmetaofficial

dates: June 16 – 22, 2025

location: Rebgasse, Basel, Switzerland

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Dutch street artist Frankey unveils Hubbabubbabuilding, a new bubblegum-inspired sculpture perched atop a roof on the Zandvoort promenade in the Netherlands. The site-specific installation features a 4-meter-tall caricature of Frankey himself, balanced on a ladder and blowing an enormous bubble of pink chewing gum that appears to burst out of the building’s windows. The piece debuts as part of Street Art Zandvoort 2025 and acts as a preview for Gumballin’ 2, the sequel to the artist’s 2020 solo show.

all images courtesy of Frankey

playful sculpture marks the start of Gumballin’ 2 exhibition

Hubbabubbabuilding reflects Frankey’s signature style of ‘positive interventions’—humorous, unexpected elements that momentarily reframe the built environment. Playful and cartoonish in form, the figure injects a dose of absurdity and childlike wonder into the seaside skyline. ‘Chewing gum is perhaps the weirdest product on earth,’ the Dutch artist explains. ‘It’s pointless, and maybe that’s the point. In its uselessness lies something real: wonder, play, fun.’

The installation not only nods to Frankey’s own likeness but also to the familiar act of bubble-blowing. Set against the backdrop of Zandvoort’s rooftops, the giant gum bubble reads as both joyful disruption and whimsical monument, prompting passersby to pause and look up. Hubbabubbabuilding also signals the official start of Gumballin’ 2, a forthcoming exhibition that continues the themes explored in Frankey’s earlier work at the Gashouder. While the first show positioned bubblegum as a playful material and metaphor, the upcoming sequel promises to delve deeper into its cultural and emotional resonances. The rooftop intervention os set to remain on view through September 6th, 2025.

the 4-meter-tall figure is a caricature of frankey himself, mid-bubble, balanced on a ladder high above the street

playful and absurd, Hubbabubbabuilding invites passersby to pause, smile, and look up

part street art, part self-portrait, and part ode to childhood wonder

the rooftop sculpture transforms bubble-blowing into public spectacle

‘chewing gum is pointless—and maybe that’s the point,’ says Frankey of the inspiration behind the piece

the artist rendered in cartoonish form, frozen in a playful act of bubble-blowing

project info: 

name: Hubbabubbabuilding
artist: Frankey | @streetartfrankey
location: Zandvoort, the Netherlands 

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Ernesto Neto has filled the Nef Nord of Paris‘s Grand Palais with a vast, handwoven installation of bark, earth, spice, and fiber. Nosso Barco Tambor Terra invites visitors into a soft and sensory architecture, suspended beneath the glass and iron canopy recently restored by Chatillon Architectes (see designboom’s coverage here). The structure is meant to be entered, touched, and heard. Inside, rhythm and movement unfold slowly through texture and breath.

The woven installation is shaped in looping crochet, cords, and braided skins that hang and seem to grow downward. While Neto’s forms appear intuitive and improvised, they hold their own internal order. The installation connects body to earth, rhythm to breath, and matter to movement.

Ernesto Neto fills the Grand Palais with a woven structure | image © GrandPalaisRmn 2025 / Photo Didier Plow

Rhythm as Structure within the grand palais

There are instruments hidden inside artist Ernesto Neto’s work at the Grand Palais. Some are barely visible, folded into the skins of the structure like bones. Others invite touch directly. On designated days, musicians coax out their voices in performances that feel less like concerts than ceremonies. Drums from across continents — Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America — respond to each other and to the visitors’ presence. The sound emerges from within the piece, resonating through it like a pulse through a body.

This immersive environment forms the center of Nosso Barco Tambor Terra, though the boundaries remain open. Around the structure, the Grand Palais hosts ongoing activations: open conversations, workshops, live music, and play. A Brazilian café serves as a gathering point. The surrounding programming extends Neto’s vision outward, into dialogue and shared attention.

visitors can interact with the organic materials | image © GrandPalaisRmn 2025 / Photo Didier Plow

a woven membrane for gathering

Ernesto Neto speaks in a language of materials that resist polish. Bark and raw fiber, hand-woven mesh, suspended spice bundles — everything points to manual labor, to knowledge passed down through the body. The space becomes a collective membrane, a place where traditions drift together, not diluted but echoed. His approach to scale is as much emotional as physical. 

The setting amplifies this intention. After several years of restoration led by Chatillon Architectes, the Grand Palais reopens with renewed clarity just in time for the 2024 Paris Olympics. The freshly restructured envelope now plays host to something profoundly unmechanical, unhurried. The juxtaposition feels deliberate. Neto’s project is one of slowness and attention, rooted in the body and the ground beneath it.

Presented in collaboration with Lisbon’s MAAT and as part of the France–Brazil Season 2025, this exhibition expands the idea of architecture beyond construction. Neto frames it as something we move through with care, something that listens back. It makes room for rest and for ceremony and leaves traces in the senses. And in the center of Paris, it becomes a vessel for learning and for dreaming.

drums inside the work are played during live shows | image © GrandPalaisRmn 2025 / Photo Didier Plow

the piece hosts workshops, concerts, and communal events | image © designboom

materials reflect ancestral craft and manual labor | image © GrandPalaisRmn 2025 / Photo Didier Plow

the restored Grand Palais offers a luminous setting | image © designboom

the project is part of the France–Brazil Season 2025 | image © designboom

the installation is co-produced by MAAT in Lisbon | image © designboom

project info:

name: Nosso Barco Tambor Terra

architect: Ernesto Neto | @ernestonetoart

location: Grand Palais, Paris, France

event: France–Brazil Season 2025

collaboration: MAAT

photography: © designboom, © GrandPalaisRmn 2025 / Photo Didier Plow

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The Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris transforms into a mesmerizing aquatic and musical landscape with the unveiling of clinamen, an immersive installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. On view until September 21st, 2025, and curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director of the Pinault Collection, the large-scale project envelops visitors in a multisensory experience where porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement. At the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water. This vast, tranquil surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky visible through the museum’s iconic dome. White ceramic bowls drift across its surface, propelled by gentle currents, producing unpredictable melodic chimes as they serendipitously collide. 

While this is not the first iteration of clinamen – earlier versions have been staged at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Centre Pompidou-Metz – it is the most ambitious to date. ‘This exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date,’ Céleste Boursier-Mougenot tells designboom. The museum’s architecture played a pivotal role. ‘My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work,’ the artist notes,‘I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ.’ Encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome, the Rotunda offers a rare resonance.‘The immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension,’ Boursier-Mougenot says.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, clinamen v.10, 2012-2025, courtesy of the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), Galerie Xippas (Paris), Galerie Mario Mazzoli (Berlin) | photo by Nicolas Brasseur | all images courtesy of Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, unless stated otherwise

embracing unpredictability within the clinamen installation

Like many of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works, the Bourse de Commerce installation exists at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and performance. It also marks the culmination of decades of experimentation with sonic systems that operate independently of human control. A musician by origin, Boursier-Mougenot approaches sound as a ‘living material’ – as seen in clinamen, where the traditional constraints of music are shed, replaced by a self-regulating system that breathes and changes with each passing moment. ‘My systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms,’ the artist explains. 

The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random, unpredictable motion of atoms. For Boursier-Mougenot, this idea mirrors the elemental operations at play in the installation. ‘The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation,’ the artist says. He sees the installation as ‘a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears.’ The inherent unpredictability is central to the experience: ‘if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.’

clinamen takes over the iconic Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce

enveloping visitors in a multisensory experience

Boursier-Mougenot deliberately embraces unpredictability in his creative process, a practice he discovered when allowing external sounds to enrich his compositions. This openness led him to ‘think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.’ This philosophy informs the entire structure of clinamen, which runs on a self-regulating system akin to a living organism. The materials, too, are deliberately fragile and mutable. Porcelain, water, sound. ‘It was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe […] that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago,’ he recalls. Clinamen beautifully embodies a tension between apparent opposites: order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. The artist’s previous work, harmonichaos, which involved vacuum cleaners playing harmonicas, explored similar themes of unpredictable, self-regulating systems. ‘With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another,’ he shares, highlighting the interplay of chance and inherent system logic.

In a world defined by acceleration and distraction, clinamen invites a radical slowing down. Visitors become part of the installation simply by being present. ‘With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence,’ he says. ‘The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.’ Ultimately, clinamen is not only a meditation on matter, motion, and sound, but a quietly profound call to attention. ‘I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world,’ Boursier-Mougenot admits, ‘but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.’ Read our conversation with the artist in full below, and watch clinamen in action here.

porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement | photo by Florent Michel / 11H45

INTERVIEW WITH Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

designboom (DB): How did the architecture of the Rotunda in the Bourse de Commerce shape this version of the clinamen?

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (CBM): My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work. I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ. In this way, many of the installation’s parameters can be redefined by the characteristics and particularities of the venue. At the Bourse de Commerce, the immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension.

DB: The immersive installation has been shown before, but never at this scale. What new possibilities—or challenges—did this larger format bring?

CBM: You’re right, this exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date. At this stage, no one can say for sure whether everything will work as usual on this scale. It’s a challenge, with a multitude of technical issues to resolve in order to remain faithful to the work and its simplicity. To achieve this, I’m working with a team of excellent technicians, and it’s only at the time of the tests that we’ll know if everything is working. So it’s quite experimental, as I think any attempt at art should be.

at the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water

DB: The title clinamen refers to the random motion of atoms in Epicurean physics. How does this idea connect to the movement and behavior of the installation?

CBM: Clinamen, this word and its definition came to me in the summer of 1997, as I was leafing through the pages of a dictionary. I was looking for a title for my new installation that would describe the principle of the work. I had the word declination in mind and was looking for a synonym here and there. The cosmic connotations of clinamen immediately captivated me and I found many analogies between the phenomenon it describes and my work in progress. So I adopted the title. Shortly afterwards, in view of the installation’s appearance, the title clinamen seemed a little pretentious, and for the work’s first exhibition I called it untitled. In the years that followed, untitled enjoyed great success in France and abroad in many different versions. Around 2003, production of the inflatable swimming pool model I had been using came to an abrupt halt. I had to design my installations with floating porcelain by having raised floors made into which one or more round pools could be integrated. Later, for exhibitions in vast spaces without walls, the raised floor took the form of a platform with access ramps and surrounded by circular benches, virtually acting as walls. As versions of the installation became larger and more planispheric, I decided in 2012 to rename the largest of them clinamen.

The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation. For materialists, the clinamen is the minimum angle that leads atoms, those inseparable and eternal particles, to collide and assemble to produce, by aggregation, all the perishable matter of our world, which constantly disintegrates and reformates : atoms are to matter what the letters of the alphabet are to language and writing, and it is from the variety of their combination that everything exists. In my work, there is also a curved movement that leads the cells represented by the porcelain bowls to collide, producing a world of sounds and potentially all the occurrences of the elements present. We can contemplate clinamen installation as a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears. But if you try to trace the causal thread of a sequence, it’s impossible to do it live. In other words, if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.

unpredictable melodic chimes emerge as the bowls serendipitously collide

DB: The piece is guided by invisible currents, where ceramic bowls create sound through chance encounters. How do you work with unpredictability as part of your creative process?

CBM: I discovered the virtues of unpredictability for my music the day I accepted that outside sounds, totally unrelated to my own, such as those of the urban environment of the unspoilt place where I was producing my music, could mix with it and enrich it. Later, during a play by the company whose music I was composing, which was being staged on the roof of a campus building, the sounds of cars in the distance or the sound of the wind could be heard. The sounds of cars in the distance or voices, wind, planes passing in the sky and crows flying overhead mixed with my music for a noisy string quartet and reanimated it. It was all a question of sound levels and permanence of course, but it gave a “here and now” quality to my recorded and broadcast music. Later, I often used microphones to pick up sounds live outside theatres, reinjecting them and mixing them with my music. These experiences opened my ears and gradually led me to think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.

ceramic bowls drift across the water surface, propelled by gentle currents

DB: Your choice of materials—porcelain bowls, water, currents—feels deliberately elemental. What draws you to these fragile, mutable mediums?

CBM: One day, Jack, a friend of mine who’s a piano maker, said to me: the piano is a collection of different materials – metal, wood, felt, glue, etc. – which can be dangerous to each other, and which are also subject to phenomenal mechanical tensions capable of destroying them. Fortunately, the ingenious arrangement of these materials results in an almost living object that only awaits the tension of the pianist’s nervous system to become the alter ego of the player.
For my part, it was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe (inflatable pool, soft plastic, glass, porcelain, water, pump, electricity, heating element, etc.) that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago. In the field of art and installation, any object can be considered according to criteria that no longer have anything to do with its functionality.

as the bowls serendipitously collide they produce unpredictable melodic chimes | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

DB: You’ve described sound as a ‘living material.’ How do you approach sound, not just as music, but as something sculptural, spatial, and physical ?

CBM: Rather, my systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms. As I relate with the harmonicaos work and the use of tuners immersed in a form of hesitation or doubt that I notice and exploit to thwart forms of off-putting repetition.

DB: There’s a tension in clinamen—between order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. How do you see these opposites coexisting in your work ?

It’s funny, towards the end of the nineties, I called an installation harmonichaos. It consists of thirteen silent vacuum cleaners, each of which plays a small diatonic harmonica, whose tonality, or tuning of the vacuumed notes, is different from the twelve other harmonicas. The operation and shutdown of each vacuum/harmonica module depends on a frequency analyzer built into the module. This is a chromatic tuner used by musicians to tune their instruments. It accurately identifies the sound frequency of a single note at a time, but its analysis becomes more than uncertain as soon as the device detects several notes or a chord simultaneously. The device reacts to surrounding sounds, hesitates, contradicts itself …
Observing this, I thought that a logic other than the one for which the device had been designed was at work, because the time division seemed “alive” to me. It was only a short step from there to imagining a specific form of life. I used the device because of its unreliability. With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another. Each module interacts with the twelve others in the ensemble ad libitum. What’s more, this low-tech system is disrupted by variations in the voltage of the electrical network feeding it, making any attempt at prediction even more highly improbable.

clinamen is encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

DB: Your installations often invite the audience into a sensory, open-ended experience. What role does the visitor play in activating or completing the work?

CBM: When you visit an exhibition, aren’t you yourself sensitive to the presence of other visitors? If they give you the impression of not knowing why they’re there? It can be funny, but it can also be pathetic. If they only look at the works through their cameras or smartphones, and step back without paying attention to the other visitors to frame a masterpiece, I think that’s awful. With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence. When I succeed in doing this, I find it makes people more beautiful… I’ve also noticed that when I compose the spaces of my installations using circles or curves, it makes visitors’ trajectories more harmonious and their wandering more fluid than in orthogonal spaces. The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.

DB: In an age of speed and distraction, how do you see your work offering space for slowness, attention, and contemplation?

CBM: I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world, I don’t presume to know what anyone needs, but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.

the water surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky through the museum’s dome | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

the installation invites visitors to sit down and slow down | image © designboom

project info:

name: clinamen

artist: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot | @celesteboursiermougenot

curator: Emma Lavigne, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection

location: Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, 75001, Paris, France | @boursedecommerce

dates: June 5th – September 21st, 2025

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