from Lyon: Pedro Cabrita Reis

The Bichat Warehouse, a previously abandoned garage tucked away in the more industrial portion of the city of Lyon, France, houses a single work produced specifically for the site and the Biennale. Fluorescent lights installed by the artists Pedro Cabrita Reis, a work titled Les Dormeurs/The Sleepers, occupy every area of the building through hanging, laying, and tilting. While some lights follow the straight architecture of the space, along the support beams and across pipes and railings, along the support beams and across pipers and railings, others float in space or partially rest on the floor, some hanging horizontally from the ceiling and others meeting the floor on one side and remaining by the overhead electrical chord. The shrubs growing out of the dirty concrete floor remain, as do the cigarette butts, posting on the wall, and a few old scattered aluminium cans.




While the light fixtures immediately provide a sense of stimulation, a supposed “uniqueness” to an otherwise popularly considered banal or even dead space, they also serve as pace markers, their precarious positioning throughout the expanse of floorspace forcing the viewer to move slower and with more consideration.



Inside is a relatively quiet sound, a shelter from the city. A prolonged visit can affect a basic understanding and appreciation for the structure the lights are housed in, their relationship being a symbiotic one in creating a contemplative atmosphere. Not a simulation of a dirty warehouse, The Bichat is authentic in it’s character and, to Reis’ credit, the temptations of vast space did not persuade him to make an offensive intrusion. Rather, the structure serves more as a nesting ground for the fluorescent tubes, utilizing atmospheric and architectural attributes already present without inciting a dramatic physical alteration.



Although the viewer isn’t necessarily presented anything new, this work echoing the likes Donald Judd and minimalist aesthetics, perhaps the most rewarding aspect of this work is the showcasing of something which is old, neglected and forgotten, treated in such a way for it begin again in being a space of activity beyond it’s natural process of aging. Through the external forces of animation on part of the artist and electricity, Reis manages to highlight pre-existing conditions within The Bichat Warehouse. In the fact that the warehouse is not transformed, only accompanied through a contemplative intervention, a spectatorship is allowed in, the workings of the art event opening up urban space formerly deserted. This is the first year the warehouse, most famously an arsenal built in 1916, was incorporated into the Lyon Biennale, becoming part of the corporeal map of sites. The antecedently abandoned becomes an attraction through the process of art. In this idea lies a potential purpose for arts contemporary existence.