Annette Messager transforms Piscine Château-Landon into a fantastical aquatic landscape, populated by mythological figures and suffused with a sensitive poetics of love, desire, and vertigo.
Sirénocturne, in-situ installation and performances, 2026 The artist takes over the recently renovated Piscine Château-Landon and reveals its liquid memory. The pool becomes a submerged stage, populated by mermaids and tritons — figures of desire and ambiguity whose song, since Antiquity, has lured and led people astray. The architecture of the place becomes an echo chamber through which these hybrid presences circulate, half-body, half-dream, wavering between apparition and disappearance. Inflatable forms with organic contours, as if risen from the depths, brush the surface, while a web of sound and light envelops the whole and heightens its sensory dimension. From the galleries, the public contemplates this suspended aquatic world. At the crossroads of myth and intimacy, Annette Messager metamorphoses this everyday place into a fantastical landscape. She unfolds a poetics of love — made of attraction, illusion, and vertigo — and invites everyone to let themselves drift, listening to these voices from the depths of the water. Annette Messager (born in 1943 in Berck. She lives and works in Paris) is a French artist recognized for her installations that combine visual arts and poetic storytelling. Her work explores the intimate and the fantastical, often through hybrid figures, fabrics, objects, or sculptural forms. She questions memory, identity, and bodies, creating immersive worlds that blend beauty, unease, and subtle humor. With the participation of professional mermaids Claire La Sirène, Ingrid Fabulet, Floria Darling, and triton Gabriel Tabarini, Miss Mermaid, and the Académie des Sirènes.
Source: paris.fr — photo: © Studio Annette Messager, © Adagp, Paris, 2026