Echoing the title of the Palais de Tokyo’s season, Tous les feux, les fleurs, the Chambre des échos presents three large-scale reproductions from a collection of postcards depicting flowers. Ordinary images that graphic designer Charles Villa exposed to sunlight for several months. Its ultraviolet rays gradually caused the most fragile pigments — yellows, magentas and fluorescent colours — to disappear. Little by little, the flowers turned blue.

It is this inevitable alteration of colours and things that Yto Barrada’s film, presented on the adjacent wall, explores. The Power of Two or Three Suns (2020), a short 16 mm film, takes us inside a laboratory where the durability of textiles is tested by simulating the passage of time, using a demiurgic machine capable of reproducing the power of two or three suns.

The turning blue of printed images points to our own exposure to an environment that we have helped make increasingly scorching. Around this colour, a selection of books by Olivier Marboeuf, Imani Perry, Derek Jarman and Maggie Nelson unfolds, each taking blue as its point of departure: a colour that can be melancholic, erotic, haunted, luminous, evanescent, unstable, unfathomable; a surface of disappearance, a liquid space of memory and transmission.

The turning blue of printed images points to our own exposure to an environment that we have helped make increasingly scorching. Around this colour, a selection of books by Olivier Marboeuf, Imani Perry, Derek Jarman and Maggie Nelson unfolds, each taking blue as its point of departure: a colour that can be melancholic, erotic, haunted, luminous, evanescent, unstable, unfathomable; a surface of disappearance, a liquid space of memory and transmission. 

This Chambre des échos thus brings together, around blue, elements that do not always seem to belong together: an ocean, an obsessive love, a departed friend, an old advertisement, a sky, or the traumatic memory of a scattered family. They echo the thousands of anonymous images turned blue, collected by Charles Villa and laid out for you on the table. Everyone is invited to take a blue image with them, but also to send one in turn, contributing to this collective emotional matter made up of a thousand shades of blue.

The Chamber of echos is a space dedicated to cultural programming and mediation. Located within the Palais de Tokyo’s free admission area, it hosts exhibitions and events of varying scales and durations. Conceived as a flexible and responsive platform, it is inspired by the principles of cultural rights, which affirm every individual and community’s right to participate in cultural life and to express their own culture.

Free admission from the Palais de Tokyo entrance hall.