Wings of Desire
The Frac Centre-Val de Loire presents a series of masterpieces from its collection, in a display at once poetic and didactic about the need to leave. For this exhibition, the selected architectural works all share the same dream to finally leave Earth. The title is an inverted reference to Wim Wenders’ famous 1987 film, in which an angel decides to cut its wings and experience happiness on Earth.
Either utopian or experimental, the search for alternatives to life on Earth questions their very legitimacy: does this obsessional and age-long quest have more to do with the exploration of an ideal or is it cut-out for failure? In a same movement, the fantasy of a helicopter ride turned Maison de vacances volante (Guy Rottier) dialogs with My Wings (Mario Terzic): on one side, the will to be free from real estate, on the other the realization that flying has become impossible. As much as Discours sur les passions de l’amour (Guy Debord) is an invitation to aimlessness, Instant City (Archigram) gives up on duration in favour of immediacy… and so on and so forth. Finally, after the dream of a Orden Cósmico (Ana Buenaventura & Francisco Javier Seguí de la Riva), Germen Radiolario (María Mallo) restore the memory that we experience architecture before the word: as a foetus in a mother’s womb.
Exhibited artists and architects :
Alisa Andrasek, Archigram ( Peter Cook & David Greene ), Archizoom Associati, Guy Debord, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Günther Domenig & Eilfried Huth, Saba Innab, Yona Friedman, Luca Galofaro, Haus-Rucker-Co, María Mallo, Guy Rottier, Francisco Javier Seguí de la Riva & Ana Buenaventura, Pierre Székely and Mario Terzic.
Wings of Desire, 2023 exhibition space
Educational area
The art and public service of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire have collaborated to design a heterogeneous mediation device proposing digital content as well as tangible objects. Several tools can be used by visitors of all ages but also by the mediators during the visits: a playful course with imagination games, a participative magnetized construction wall, interviews in the form of videos and a wall of quotations of the architects. These devices suggest to the visitors to be more enterprising, curious, to know more and especially to experiment, like our architects. In our exhibitions, the artistic choices as well as the mediation devices allow us to reach our most diverse visitors.
Exhibition views
Mario Terzic, « My Wings », 1970. Collection Frac Centre-Val de Loire