In Reverse...​

​Hala Wardé

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The first time I spoke to Nan Goldin, she was in New York where it was daytime, and I was in the middle of the Nabataean Desert beneath a starry night sky.

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We needed to talk about a collaboration involving her work as an artist and an architectural installation for presenting it in the gardens of Versailles. I listened at length to her initial ideas. She had just learned of the Women’s March on Versailles at the time of the French Revolution and was particularly intrigued by it. She sent me an array of literature on the subject which I, in turn, read. She touched upon the idea of a labyrinth... Several conversations ensued, always intense, always meaningful.

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We met a few weeks later at Versailles, together with Alfred Pacquement. Nan Goldin had discovered the beauty of Versailles’ underground waterworks system for its fountains and spent all her time there. Meanwhile, the idea of an outdoor installation had been abandoned in favor of the interior of the Petit Trianon.

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We paced the premises every which way, looking for the spaces that would work, but to no avail. Nan was drawn to secret, hidden places, exploring areas closed off to the public. We lost her, and then found her again in the basement, where she felt more at home.

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We discovered a dark, vaulted stone corridor that served as an emergency exit. We then discovered another corridor on a higher level, also in stone but light and winding, leading to a hidden door. These two corridors were linked only visually, through a window. I suggested to Nan that we temporarily remove this window to make a distinctive space with a specific purpose, that of connecting the two corridors. A connecting room with a few steps; a sort of “articulation.”

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My intervention as an architect focused largely on this new room, and especially on revealing these existing spaces – this unknown path, separated from the rooms in the Petit Trianon, and these two secret doors – as well as the material itself: stonework, in dampened shadow or brushed by morning light, in harmony with the crude steel of the “articulation.”

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It was ultimately a question of inversion, or rather perversion, of the circuit. Accessing the place the wrong way, entering via the exit, walking along the path in reverse...

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In the first dark corridor, the visitor is disorientated and loses their bearings, as in a labyrinth or the underground waterworks that Nan Goldin photographed so magnificently, images of which cover the stone vaulting. The visitor is then led through the “articulation” to reach the second space, bathed in natural light and populated with stone women, infused with life if not physicality by Nan Goldin’s life-size prints and the voices. Soundwalk Collective’s sonic intervention completes this immersive experience perfectly, making this installation a unique, total artwork.