From 29 March to 27 August at the Musée Carnavalet, a sensory experience that oscillates between imagination and reality - pataphysics, in fact - discovering Paris, designed by Philippe Starck
Paris like this has never been seen before. And maybe he will never see himself again.
It is the one studied, imagined and told by Philippe Starck on the occasion of the exhibition Paris is pataphysics. More than an exhibition, a sensory experience set up in the spaces of the Musée Carnavalet and created in the image and likeness of the great transalpine designer who for the occasion becomes the most original of ciceroni.
The appointment is set from March 29 to August 27: in this period of time the public will be accompanied on an itinerary, which oscillates between imagination and reality, in where you will discover parks, museums, palaces, canals within an original setting designed by Starck himself.
The driving force behind all this is obviously creativity, but also Pataphysics, as the title of the exhibition states.
What is it about? The copyright of the term is the work of the French writer A. Jarry. Pataphysics is the 'science of imaginary solutions'.

Often considered as a logic of the absurd, over the years it has succeeded so much in influencing writers, painters, filmmakers, critics, mathematicians and philosophers as to become a real artistic current.

Starck has chosen her to pay homage to her hometown by exploring 12 more or less poetic junctions. Tourist destinations and centers of power, convivial spaces and public spaces.
You go from the Musée Grévin to the vault of the Saint-Martin canal and the lock of the Arsenale; from La tour Eiffel, which Starck calls 'la grande osseuse' to the old public baths in rue du Bourg-l'Abbé, from the Parc de la Villette to the Café Stern, from Danielle Mitterrand's bedroom at the 1983 Elysée to the Café Costes, of place des Innocents, 1984-1994.
In short, Paris to the nth degree.
“This city evokes elegance in me. - explains the designer - There is harmony here. There are proportions, alignments, perspectives that make everyone feel extremely intelligent. Paris is the very evocation of intelligence".

The exhibition therefore plays with the links between history and fiction.

It escapes historical reconstruction, works on distortions, on improbable superimpositions and above all on wonders. At this point the question arises spontaneously: why talk about Pataphysics today? Are we planning escape routes from the world?

“Let's talk about Pataphysics now because 2023 is the 150th anniversary of Alfred Jarry's birth - explains the director of the museum, Valerie Guillaume - This science offers all of us the keys to designing the world and opening the doors to new universes”.

“Pataphysicists share a taste for the beautiful and at the same time for the impossible. - echoes Starck, appointed Regent of the College of Pataphysics - But above all they are people incapable of taking things seriously. A bit like me.

Life for me means taking serious things lightly and light things seriously.

It is the first time that the Musée Carnavalet presents such a surprising and original project.

The texts of the various rooms are designed by Philippe Starck, while the scenography is created by the Atelier Maciej Fiszer and unravels through atmospheres that follow one another in an installation guided by a low-tech approach, respecting the environment.

Respect that goes from the reuse of equipment used for previous exhibitions to the search for objects found in the markets of the Ville Lumière.

”I am a man of forests, dunes, big waves - says Starck -, but if I have to go to Paris I like gray areas. I share Modiano's love for those areas where you wonder if what you see really exists.

These buffer areas between different neighborhoods, placed before or immediately after the ring road. Spaces that we just don't understand.

But I believe that beauty and poetry are expressed in places that have not been designed. In short, I believe that beauty, after all, is expressed in the shadows”.