With Outremonde, Théo Mercier conceives an exhibition-performance that, for the first time, brings together his dual practices as a sculptor and theatre director.

Three white rooms inhabited by speaking, sound-producing sculptures. Here, sand has overtaken everything, transforming the space and everything within it. Invited by the Collection Lambert as part of the 71st edition of the Festival d’Avignon in 2021, Théo Mercier transformed the Hôtel de Montfaucon into an immersive sensory fiction.

OUTREMONDE is a journey aboard a vessel beneath the surface of the world a place-character, a biotope of a new kind, where the act of looking lies at the very heart of the experience…

Within this landscape sculpted entirely from sand, only fragments remain: of humankind, a single foot; of the animal kingdom, a sleeping dog; of a Gothic church, a heap of ruins; of the forest, a series of tree trunks. They appear as the remnants of a vanished civilization.

At the centre stands a child the guide and narrator of this post-apocalyptic world leading the audience toward three wandering souls. A woman, a man, and an elderly grandmother form the child's surrogate family. Through a series of activations and performances, this living landscape becomes a vessel for our fantasies and our fears. Creating a universe that is at once haunting and deeply sensitive, Théo Mercier challenges our perceptions, unsettles the certainties of our senses, and calls into question the very truth of what we believe we see.

What becomes of the exhibition experience when we are guided by a voice whether embodied or ghostly and by a choreography of light and images that extends the original arrangement of objects?

Suspended between the slow, expansive temporality of matter in transformation and the crystallised time of the exhibition, the spectator-visitor is immersed in a hybrid environment where the objects and bodies they encounter are at once the living substance of the exhibition unfolding here and now, and the traces or archives of past and future activations true archaeologies of an imagined future.

At once sensory and spectacular, living and still, OUTREMONDE proposes a new way of thinking about the presence and movement of the audience within the spaces of exhibition and performance. A catalyst for new ways of seeing, this metaphysical tale of childhood explores metamorphosis and the generative power of the imagination.

Following this first chapter, the project continued over the next two years as a trilogy: Outremonde II – Dream Hunters at Luma Westbau in Zurich, followed by Outremonde III – The Sleeping Chapter at the Conciergerie in Paris.