Ugo Arsac

IN-URBE - Installation - 2020

présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 22

IN-URBE IN-URBE IN-URBE

Installation

“From’’ the city and “in’’ the city …
It happens underneath,
In Leviathan’s intestines.

There are maps of the surface, organised and indisputable. There are others that are fractal and complex, maps of the depths. I spent a year exploring the underground world of Paris, collecting 3D scan of this tangled, obscure and symbolic system.

“There are all the things we don’t see, that we don’t want to see, that we have forgotten.” Squeezing through these narrow passages at night, passing through the spirals and murky waters of a sleeping metropolis, I discovered another interpretation of space in which one senses a mystical echo, one feels oneself to be in a neuronal world.

The installation IN-URBE is a stratified labyrinth on an uncertain scale. Sitting on a block of black marble, massive and cold, we remain in contact with the earth while on a VR headset we set off on an inward, introspective journey. Are we passing through the underground world or penetrating the folds of our own consciousness?

Ugo Arsac

Production

Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing

Partenaires

Scam — Centquatre-Paris 104 — EDIS – Digital art fund — Ardenome — Flaxco ® — CELC – European Confederation of Flax and Hemp — Nextsound Lab

Acknowledgments

To underground encounters, to impromptu guides, to stories, to anecdotes, and to all those who were of precious help but prefer to remain in the shadows, unnamed.
To the marvellous secret gift of Pierre-bleue from Belgium.
And to all the people mentioned below, or not, who were excited about the project.

Amir Sassone, Suni Prisco, Brice Nougès, Antoine Boucherikha & Thomas Rouvillain, Juan-Pablo Villegas, Alexis Hallaert, Pierre-Yves Boisramé,

Paolo Cirio, Eric Prigent, Cyprien Quairiat, Massimiliano Simbula, Laurent Delplanque, François Bedhomme, Pierre Le Lay, Alice Goudon, Cindy Coutant.
Caroline Flipts & Ludwig Ryckebosch, Véronique Baton, Paola Dall’Olio. K, Cena, Microcosme, R, Kapa, Roti, IDfix, A, Mthsbns, Denis.