Laure Prouvost constantly tests the potential of imagination in shaping our perception of reality and questions conventions. The artist has created works using artificial intelligence to generate videos that can never be seen twice, and has even collaborated with CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, located between Switzerland and France.
This search for artificial elements is also counterbalanced by her use of natural ones—here, the blooming of flowers—as a way to explore layers of reality that remain imperceptible at first glance. She attributes human traits and sensations to robots, incorporates organic materials such as plants, and creates installations that resist conventional patterns. She understands that life also unfolds at a subatomic level, and that nothing can be dismissed when thinking about existence—from the tiniest particle to the cosmic and planetary scale.
At the center of the Pavilion, Prouvost presents flow flower: bloom! (2025), a monumental installation in the form of a suspended chandelier, connecting different floors of the building. From its metallic structure hang threads, torn fabrics in pinkish and beige tones, climbing plants grown in a central suspended pot that expand freely, and fragments of urban objects—buttons, tires, and exhaust pipes molded in clay. The chosen plants, fast-growing vines often considered weeds, display blossoms in shades of blue, lilac, purple, and pink, creating chromatic contrasts with the urban and industrial materials.
Among these elements, glass volumes shaped like breasts light up with gentle pulses, simulating continuous breathing. Amid the vibrant green of plants and the dryness of twisted branches, there are also strands of cassette tape, small glass elements evoking bees or mosquitoes, and perforated suspended pouches, from which seeds slowly escape, scattering across the floor.
On the lower level, visitors encounter these remnants: scattered seeds, fallen leaves. The space is permeated by a soundscape diffused through speakers, weaving together subtle noises of vegetal growth with poems by Conceição Evaristo, suggesting stories of movement and migration.
From afar, the work announces itself through sound and traces on the ground. It moves through space in a ghostlike manner. As visitors draw closer and circulate between the building’s levels, new aspects reveal themselves: the entanglement of plants and debris, the suspended luminous volumes, the reflections on the floor. The installation never presents itself in a single or definitive form; instead, it reinvents itself at every approach, remaining open to multiple ways of being present in the space.