The work La réponse de la plante à l'oeuf (A Plant's Response to an Egg) was presented to mark the partnership between the Paris-based art association ILYAURA and the Paris art space The Window. The date was October 5, 2013 — the night of the 10th Nuit Blanche à Paris.
Once a year, on the night when museums and galleries across Paris do not sleep, new events were born and dissolved in every corner of the city — much like the countless fireworks launched by Cai Guo-Qiang that wrapped the banks of the Seine in dazzling light as one of the evening's main spectacles. Fujiko Nakaya's installation, which blanketed the Place de la République in the northeast of Paris with a dense fog, was one such event. The suddenly materializing, massive "fog sculpture" enveloped the familiar space of the Place de la République in white mist, and the fog, continuously generated, grew steadily deeper. Creating a rift in the world beyond those accumulated layers of whiteness, Nakaya's fog invited its visitors to "a place that is neither here nor now."
The work A Plant's Response to an Egg is a "device" conceived to summon a window that should not exist — to cast everyone who encounters this rift in time and space into a relationship they have never before witnessed. A real-time video installation that reimagines the entire environment surrounding The Window as "a place with multiple large windows," the work was conceived through a process of mutual dialogue between two France-based artists, Tomohito Ishii and Manon Harrois. A "mysterious cake" co-constructed by the author and event participants served as one relay point, and a computer installed there connected different locations online. Four cities — Reims and Strasbourg in France, Tokyo in Japan, and Kyoto, where the third Nuit Blanche was held in 2013 — were linked to The Window in Paris. The Window, with its one glazed façade and three solid walls, became entirely windows. In each city, performers faced those of us on this side, unfolding improvisational dialogues — abstract, philosophical, phenomenal, and physical.
One of the remote performers, Manon Harrois, warmed an unfertilized egg — translucent and yellow — with her own body heat on the other side of the screen, as mother birds so often do. The egg, however, had already lost its shell, the very thing that had concealed and protected it; reduced to a slippery, vulnerable yolk, it warmed inside Harrois's mouth and was born once more. In response to this act, a pure white egg — sheltered again within a shell — was laid among the large potted houseplants standing in the gallery. The vulnerable yolk that Harrois had brought forth wrapped itself in a shell to cross the boundary separating her from us, and can be understood as having been received by the plants in a metaphysical sense. Meanwhile, on the two large walls — the wall directly opposite the window and the large wall to the left as one faces it — one of the four cities was projected in turn, and these newly opened windows functioned as surfaces of exchange through which different places passed simultaneously back and forth. The potted houseplant is one of Ishii's most important painting motifs, a presence with which he has cohabited for several years. Ishii bestowed upon each of the unfertilized eggs — hollow existences that the plant had taken on one after another — a "mark" of life, and carefully delivered them to the viewers. The eggs sometimes broke, dissolving into yellow pigment that ran across the floor; at other times they were gently placed into the open palm of someone's hand.
While the windows connected to Tokyo and Strasbourg hosted symbolic and abstract dialogues about color and form, the window opened to Kyoto projected the figure of a woman absorbed in an act that yielded nothing — attempting, with painstaking care, to scoop up one by one with chopsticks the countless eggs that had been laid but had never reached anyone, as though to bring them some form of salvation. Her attempts never succeeded, yet she did not stop. She knew from the very beginning that just as eggs that should not have held life sometimes reached viewers bearing it, her seemingly fruitless act of salvation would one day lead to a miracle that could not otherwise come to exist.
What was "a plant's response to an egg"? Among the countless stories scattered across the night of Nuit Blanche, why is it that this one endures in memory? It is because the experience of the work A Plant's Response to an Egg is what connects us. It does not become the kind of blazing excitement that slips from our hands the moment we wake from a dream; instead, it becomes something that never leaves us, something that continues to quietly warm us from within. We need not make any effort to warm what appears to be an "egg" delivered into our hands across time and space. It simply exists there, continuing to prove to us that a plant's response to an egg did indeed take place.
Of course, Nuit Blanche is a festival of art, and a festival is a resplendent rupture from the everyday. A one-night dream that vanishes literally without a trace is beautiful. And yet there are occasions when a story that appears, at first glance, entirely ephemeral — woven from the proposal of new relationships and the construction of the devices that make them possible — wholly transforms our world as it actually is. An art spectacle should, by its very nature, be something of this kind, and that is precisely why Nuit Blanche à Paris succeeded in carrying its spirit all the way to distant Kyoto.
"Parasophia au Monde" — Para-jin