Beatus is a film and exhibition project designed by Lisa Boostani. A metaphor for another world, the scenography recreates the living spaces of a fictional society through a set of four rooms: the Bedroom, the Dinner, the Circuit and Meditation. The public is invited to participate in this immersive experience where installations, works and everyday objects are laid out like the clues of a story that must be pieced together, the dream of a possible escape.

Performance in collaboration with Cassandre Muñoz (choreographer and performer). Live concert by Cosmic Neman (Zombie Zombie) with Nini Li-yun HU (flûtiste). Friday May 28, 5:30, 6:45 and 8 p.m.

The dinner
In an organic opulence, a dining room is left to itself. There are only the futile remains of a feast. A table with crawling legs (1). Dryings racks like totems, bearing quivering fruits (2). Quicksand. On the table, the ceramic tableware (3) composes a blurry story, with troubling scenes, trembling portraits. The only remains of this debauched banquet are fermenting fruits, decomposing plants: trifles of a world in distress. Remains of a ritual. The guests have left in a hurry, they haven’t even finished their meal. The protean cutlery (4) lies there idly. Are the guests really gone? It’s as if they have fainted before turni
ng into chairs. Inhabited. Accustomed. Dressed. The food that wasn’t consumed is trapped in drying racks looking like totems with overflowing shapes. A suspended, petrified flora. Prisoner of a matter desperately trying to keep the remains of a world that no longer exists.

The Circuit
Blue irradiates the entire environment. Outside, the world is frozen in a soft mist. Troubled by the fog, haggard, the eye no longer adapts in a blink. A fountain (5), rations, containers. There is something reassuring about the clinking of the mechanical source. Is it a fountain of youth, water of life? It is magical. Purifying. Maybe it is a fountain used to make wishes? What can one dream of when one is reduced to survival? Gaseous dreams. Vaporous will. Liquid hopes. An elevation of bottles (6), of ceramics (7), of light. Glaciers melt somewhere between the strategic reserve and aquatic foundations. The receptacles streak the walls with their solar reflections. Full prisms. Transparent totems. Reflections of a hope.

Meditation
If the world has met its end, the collapse has spared this place. Has it already occurred? An oasis of peace. A cold tranquillity. An ethereal refrain. The vibrations of enveloping low frequencies awaken the minds. A rocker with a soft seat (8), sinuous and childlike, faces the dialogue between air, light and rock. A breath trapped in a bubble, bound by rope (9). What could it be whispering? Will someone ever listen to it? The extraterrestrial rock will certainly remain silent. It is self-sufficient, paralyzed by a permanent illumination. In the immense wall facing it, a wreath wanders (10), like an ode to an outside world that has no right to enter this room, condemned to purity.

The Bedroom
What if all of this had never existed? In this shelter, a hymn to childhood. An echo of innocence. Naïve chants. The body plays with the mind with apparent simplicity, where one can hide to find oneself. A false candor, tranquillizing, soothing, anesthetizing. Where do children hide once they’ve become adults? In a haphazard shelter (11)? In the bottom of cans of sparkling water? In the automatic doodles of a revealed unconscious? Lucky coincidence or apparent reality, no one knows if they spend their nights having dreams or nightmares. Cryptic remains of an absent body, between its decayed hands, its abandoned head (12) and its colorful shoes (13). It protects itself from its own unconscious by doodling instinctively on disparate sheets. A purple and immortal hydra. Reflections of meaning on a mirror (14) that can no longer be seen. Subterfuges of frames, vases with dead flowers, overflowing with the improbable remains of a lost, stolen, sacrificed youth.

– Text by Andy Rankin

(1) Valentin Viebinet & Romy Texier ; (2) Jesse Wallace ; (3) Cyril Debon ; (4) Romy Texier ; (5) Benoit Ménard ; (6) Max Fouchy ; (7) Pierre ; (8) OrtaMiklos ; (9) Clara Rivault ; (10) Michel Jocaille ; (11) Jan Melka ; (12) Chevaline Corporation ; (13) Diane Gaignoux ; (14) Jack Rothert Garcia