Le jardin mécanique

Latifa Echakhch is presenting a new wide installation conceived for the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and created specifically for Villa Sauber. Curated by Célia Bernasconi, it combines references to the development of modern Monte-Carlo – such as the construction of the Opéra Garnier and the luxuriant gardens of exotic plants – with her own impressions and childhood memories.

Having delved into the paper set models made by Alphonse Visconti, the decorator at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo from 1903 to 1938, Latifa Echakhch has created a landscape as artificial as fantasized, composed of fragments of sets built for Pompeii, Rigoletto, Masques et Bergamasques, and other stage productions, which offer a distant echo of the poems composed by Lamartine on the shore of Lake Bourget.

This landscape, suspended from the cables of imaginary theatrical machinery, is closely linked with the tradition of automata, from which the artist took inspiration to create a mechanical garden in the rooms of the museum.

Stimulated by the setting of this emblematic residence of the Belle Époque and its rose garden, it is in the renewal of this tradition of romantic landscape and its associated topos – the contemplation of ruins – that Latifa Echakhch has conceived this last exhibition at Villa Sauber before it shuts for works.