A work from the immersive exhibition designed by students from the Beaux-Arts de Paris at Espace Niemeyer, engaging with the architecture to offer a sensory and poetic experience around love and the memory of the place.
Embracing the Column, an immersive installation in wood, textile, and light, inviting intimate interaction with the central pillar, 2026. Embracing the Column presents an intervention that transforms a structural element of the architecture — the column — into a center of relationship and perception. A fundamental element of architecture, the column structures the space, supports it, organizes it, and guides movement through it. This project draws on that essential function to offer a reinterpretation: the column becomes not only a support, but also a point of connection, a focus of attention and experience. In the night of love, it becomes an anchor point for an embrace, a gesture that engages the body in space. Around this column, a wooden structure unfolds, covered with translucent textile layers whose superimposition modulates degrees of transparency. The closer one moves to the column, the more opaque the structure becomes, creating an intimate zone that allows for an unrestrained gesture of embrace without exposure. Two light sources, placed near the column, diffuse a soft light that passes through the textiles and gradually reveals the different layers. This envelope acts like a membrane or a shell: it does not separate, but makes the boundary porous, allowing light, air, and presences to circulate. It thus generates an in-between space where inside and outside, visible and invisible, meet and transform. This project is part of research into forms of enclosure and relational structures, notably inspired by the image of the shell as a space that is both protective and resonant. It extends a reflection on ways of inhabiting a space through the body, by engaging a sensitive relationship between architecture and perception. The installation therefore invites visitors to experience a physical and sensory relationship with architecture. Here, the embrace becomes a spatial form: a temporary mode of inhabiting, in which attention to the body, to the other, and to the environment is recomposed in a shared experience. Da Yeong Choi was born in 1993 in Masan, South Korea. She graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2025 and is currently a student in the Fresque & Art en situation program. Through the layering and combination of visual and sound elements, she creates sensitive spaces where the visible and the invisible coexist, where images dissolve and reappear within an extended temporality. Her work reflects on the materiality of memory, disappearance, and the algorithmic logics that shape our perception of reality. STUDENTS OF THE FRESQUE & ART EN SITUATION PROGRAM AT THE ÉCOLE NATIONALE DES BEAUX-ARTS DE PARIS / Falando de Amor A project co-produced as part of an educational partnership with the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, with the participation of Espace Niemeyer.
Source: paris.fr — photo: © Da Yeong Choi, Embrasser la colonne, 3D sketch, 2026