For the past four years, designer, interior architect and ceramicist Lucas Huillet and perfumer and fragrance historian Alexandre Helwani have been developing a joint practice at the intersection of design and olfaction. They present an installation in the museum garden.
Drawing on two texts by Hugo—Ceci tuera cela, from Notre-Dame de Paris, and Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre, from Les Contemplations—they invite visitors to imagine a sensory installation in which material, fragrance and narrative come together around the origins of writing and its transformation. In Ceci tuera cela, Hugo describes stone as the earliest medium of memory. In Les Contemplations, by contrast, he evokes a more cosmic voice imbued with spirituality, in which breath and fragrance themselves become language: the installation seeks to make this duality tangible. At the heart of the garden, a first menhir rises like a primal presence. A contemporary reinterpretation of a facsimile of an ancient stone, it houses an incense-diffusing device that evokes the memory of the monument, the idea of an original form of writing and the sacred dimension of breath.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Lucas Huillet /Helwani Alexandre