At this year’s Festival des Architectures Vives, Lucia Martinez Pluchino and Raquel Duran Puente, both architects in Bordeaux, have filled with red balloons a hidden courtyard of Montpellier.
“According to the definition of emotion, not only the physique context but also a personal factor influences our emotional response to stimuli: memories, life experience, character or mood,” say the architects. “This festival provides us with a site and, through its transformation, challenges us to generate an emotion.”
These courts, that nowadays serve as passages, has became for a few days a containers of emotion. The duo have taken this idea to its limit filling one of the courts with balloons, dragging the public to experience a total immersion. Some have found peace feeling isolated, hidden, protected. Others have returned to childhood wanting to play out to exhaustion. “Pleasure, euphoria, well-being, anguish, playfulness, disorientation, whatever the case may have been, we are convinced of one thing: nobody has remained indifferent,” concluded Lucia and Raquel.
The installation, titled ‘Immersion’, has been awarded with the Public Prize.
all images © Paul Kozlowski