Paris bulletin 6 2013

To go to a conference or a concert in Louvre of an evening is to add something special to the event itself: coming out afterwards into the empty, half-dark space beneath the glass and metal pyramid, the night sky in patches above your head. Only you and a trickle of concert-goers, drifting like leaves across the polished floor. So you go, sedately up the escalator, past the gardiens, the guard dogs lying at their feet, and out onto the concourse where the water spills endlessly from flat surfaces back underground.

Both evenings I did that since I came back a week ago, a trumpet was echoing round the archway that takes you to the rue de Rivoli, a solitary busker making the stones ring out.  Not the ‘Paris by night’ of the Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergères, something more elusive and dreamlike altogether.

The occasion for these evening sorties was the festival des Ecrivains du Monde, an event hosted by the University of Columbia and taking place in a number of venues throughout the city, including la maison de la Poésie, the Théâtre des Abbesses, the BNF and the garden of the musée Jacquemart-André. The idea of spreading things around the city was a good one although it did limit how many sessions you could get to in the space of an afternoon. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing – eating more simply and savouring one’s food by chewing slowly makes for a healthier digestion.

You could really have a cultural crise de foie any week in Paris, so rich is the table laid before you, and so inviting. As fast as one festival passes by the next one is upon us. Now it’s the Festival d’Automne which goes right through to the end of December, is an annual event and encompasses all the arts, particularly what’s new and ground-breaking wherever it was conceived.

Here’s an apercu of what’s on offer – just three out of over forty of the performances/installations in the first half of the autumn:

Hope Hippo at the musée national de l’Histoire Naturelle, from 13 September – 11 November. One for the children as well as the grown-ups, the hippo is the main image on the Festival d’Automne official website (www.festival-automne.com).

Sphincterography – missed this one unfortunately, (finished this weekend). Steve Cohen, a South African artist of Lithuanian origin, looking at issues of ‘displacement’ – topical enough for the tumultuous times we live in. There are other South African offerings in the pipeline.

Eternity Dress: Olivier Saillard and Tilda Swinton at the cole des Beaux Arts on rue Bonaparte, from 20 – 24 November, (Saillard is the director of the Palais Galliéra). Here is what the blurb says about this event , en un anglais qui ne reproduit en rien l’élégance de son sujet:

“Opposing the profusion of fashion collections, Eternity Dress follows the design of one dress – made on Tilda Swinton’s body –, from the measuring up to the creation of the pattern, from the cut to the sewing together. Inspired by a 1950s method found in the museum’s collections, the dress resonates with the history of fashion and initiates an archeology (sic) of the craft.”

And before I draw a line on all these richesses, I must mention one of the main events of the autumn which has nothing to do with the Festival itself but everything to do with Paris’s history: the reopening of the musée Galliéra which has been shut for refurbishment for over a year. Saillard has chosen to mark the reopening with an exhibition of seventy of the creations of the couturier Azzedine Alaïa, there and in the salle Matisse du Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Whether you’re a fashionista or not, this is one to put in the diary.

                                                      

               
                                                      
                                                          

It’s worth mentioning another key event coming up in the not too distant future: the élections municipales in March 2014, which will also include the election of a new mayor for Paris, since Bertrand Delanoë won’t be standing for a third term. For the first time the position of mayor will be contested by two women:  Anne Hidalgo, age 54, Delanoë’s depute on the Left, and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, age 40, who has something of a reputation as a ‘blue ecologist, on the Right. Hidalgo of Spanish descent, Kosciusko-Morizet of Polish.

One of the key challenges facing whichever of these two women gets in will be the question of Paris’s growing population of homeless people. It is estimated that the number of homeless in France has almost doubled in the last decade – and shows no sign of dropping any time soon. We need some of the creative people I mentioned earlier to bring the question to the forefront of everyone’s minds. Cultural evenings at the Louvre, haute couture and hippos are all very well if you’ve got a home to go back to, and food in the cupboard.