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Palace of Versailles gets giant waterfall to ‘hold up the sky’

Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has installed a giant waterfall that cascades into the Grand Canal of the royal gardens at the Palace of Versailles outside of Paris.

Published: 7 June 2016 13:18 CEST
Palace of Versailles gets giant waterfall to 'hold up the sky'
Photo: Anders Sune Berg/Chateau de Versailles Official Website
It is so big he claimed it “almost holds up the sky”.
 
But Danish artist Olafur Eliasson refused Monday to reveal just how tall the giant waterfall he has created at France's Palace of Versailles actually is.
 
“The height is perfect,” he told reporters as he unveiled the spectacular installation which cascades into the Grand Canal of the famous royal gardens outside Paris.
 
“Just as I intended it will obscure the sun when it sets” on Midsummer's Day, said the artist, who has previously wowed New Yorkers with his 10-storey urban waterfalls and Londoners with a huge trippy sunset at the Tate Modern gallery.
 
 
Photo: Anders Sune Berg/Chateau de Versailles Official Website
 
(Photo: Anders Sune Berg/Chateau de Versailles Official Website)
 
 “Of course I could tell you how many metres it is, but I am not going to because we need to leave it to the public to make up their minds how high is high,” he said.
 
Earlier he admitted to AFP that he was “behaving like a small arrogant king” in not revealing its height, adding cryptically that the “size (of the waterfall) is decided by the confidence in the more cosmic Baroque”.
 
Eliasson said he wanted to get away from a “world where everything is reduced to statistics… to resist the idea that we have always to quantify the unquantifiable.”
 
Instead, he insisted the eight works he has created for the palace built by “Sun King” Louis XIV, the most absolute of France's absolute monarchs, were created to give “everyone the chance to become a king and queen.
 
Lost in the mist
 
 “It is about decentralising the hierarchy of the perspective… (to let everyone) winkle out the secrets” of the visual tricks Louis XIV and his architects used to impress and overawe visitors to Versailles.
 
His other works include what he hopes will be an enchanted misty ring in one of the gardens' many groves called the “Fog Assembly” in which visitors are encouraged to “lose themselves”.
 
Photo: Anders Sune Berg/Chateau de Versailles Official Website
 
Unfortunately, its full effect was somewhat obscured by a real fog on the morning of its opening. The waterfall too was sometimes lost in the mist.
 
An enormous fountain had featured in the original plans for the baroque 17th-century palace drawn up by Louis XIV's architect Andre Le Notre, but was never realised despite attempts to pump water over a hill from the river Seine.
 
“We are going to make the impossible possible,” Eliasson had earlier declared, “to make dreams come true”.
 
Photo: Anders Sune Berg/Chateau de Versailles Official Website
 
But Mother Nature in the shape of the floods that swelled the Seine last week almost undid his plans, the 49-year-old artist admitted.
 
 “Several people… kept working in the downpours while their homes were threatened by the water,” he said, paying tribute to the workers who helped install the artworks.
 
Climate change is a major theme for the artist, who grew up in Iceland. Another of the works he has created in the Colonnade Grove at Versailles is from dust left by a melting Greenland glacier that also featured in an installation he made for the COP21 climate change conference in Paris late last year.
 
Eliasson with his glacier installation in Paris last year. Photo: AFP
 
“For some people it might look like worthless mud,” he said, but the fertility of “this dust is what made civilisation”.
 
Eliasson's installations — which will be on show until October 30 — follow British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor's controversial “Queen's vagina” sculpture at the palace last year.
 
It was repeatedly defaced, once with anti-Semitic graffiti, which drew condemnation from French President Francois Hollande.

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ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

Published: 8 July 2023 10:13 CEST
African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

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