Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou
Airs de Paris Group show April 25 – August 15, 2007

Curators : Alfred Pacquement – Art : Christine Macel et Daniel Birnbaum – Design, Paysage, Urbanisme et Architecture: Valérie Guillaume

The introduction of street lighting in the city during the 19- century was at the origin of one the most important social and political revolution of the urban practice and of the form of the city. The ambition was demiurgic: to make day during the night. The street lighting caused new urban typologies (the boulevard for example) but was also the cause of new behaviors, those of the noctambulism, sauntering the evening on the boulevards, dancing in the balls. It is an ambition of the same order that we want to produce today but more contemporary, more ambiguous: that to create the night during the day. Our project is that to reinvent the night in this continuous artificial day, producing the night during the day, physically. It’s a perverted answer to the perpetual day created by modernity, Internet and contemporary globalization. After the ”Noctambulisme” we would like to invent the “Diurnisme”, using a yellow bright light which wavelengths, upper than 600 nanometers, are perceived by the body through the melatonin rhythm as a true night. The room becomes a paradox between the visible and the invisible: a night which looks like a bright day.