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 that night when museums and galleries across Paris do not sleep, new events were born and faded away in every corner of the city — much like the countless fireworks launched by Cai Guo-Qiang, wrapping the banks of the Seine in dazzling light as one of the main venues.
Fujiko Nakaya's installation, which blanketed the Place de la République in the northeast of Paris with thick fog, was one such event. The suddenly appearing, massive "fog sculpture" enveloped the familiar space of the Place de la République in white mist, and the continuously generated fog grew steadily deeper. Creating a rift in the world beyond layers of accumulated whiteness, Nakaya's fog invited visitors to "a place that is not here, not now." The work A Plant's Response to an Egg is a "device" designed to create a window that should not exist here — to cast all who encounter this rift in time and space into a relationship they have never seen before. 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 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 windowed front and three walled sides, became all windows. In each city, performers faced those of us on this side, unfolding abstract, philosophical, phenomenal, and physical improvisational dialogues.
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 often do. However, the egg had already lost its shell, the thing that had concealed it; it became a slippery, vulnerable yolk, warming inside Harrois's mouth, to be born once more. In response to this act, a pure white egg — protected once again by 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 interpreted as having been metaphysically received by the plants. The potted houseplant is one of Ishii's most important painting motifs, a presence he has cohabited with for several years. Ishii gave each of the unfertilized eggs — hollow existences the plant had one after another taken on — a "mark" of life, and carefully delivered them to the viewers. The eggs sometimes broke, turning into yellow paint that flowed to the ground, or were gently delivered into someone's open palm.
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 the futile attempt to carefully scoop up, one by one with chopsticks, the countless eggs that had been laid but never reached anyone — as if to bring them salvation. The woman's attempts never succeeded, yet she did not stop. She knew from the beginning that just as eggs that should not have been alive sometimes reached viewers bearing life, her seemingly futile act of salvation would one day lead to a miracle that could not otherwise 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 is remembered? It is because the experience of the work A Plant's Response to an Egg 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. We do not need to 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 vivid departure from the everyday. A one-night dream that vanishes literally without a trace is beautiful. At the same time, there are occasions when a seemingly fleeting story — woven from the proposal of new relationships and the construction of the devices that make them possible — completely transforms our real world. An art spectacle should by nature be something like this, and that is precisely why Nuit Blanche à Paris succeeded in spreading its spirit all the way to Kyoto.
"Parasophia au Monde" — Para-jin