Lost in space. Found in colour.

By Udita Chaturvedi

Photography: Daisuke Shima; courtesy the designer

Read Time: 2 mins

  

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Japan-based French architect and designer Emmanuelle Moureaux, known for playing with colours in public spaces, uses centimetre-level accuracy of the quasi-zenith satellite system (QZSS) as a motif in her latest paper-based vivid artwork.

For this art installation titled ‘I Am Here’, the designer-artist adopts elements from the proposed satellite-based augmentation and navigation system to create an interactive and vibrant installation. (The QZSS is efficient enough to measure global positioning to an accuracy of centimetres from approximately 40,000 km in space).

 

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Set up at an ongoing event called ‘Space in Ginza’, Emmanuelle’s installation, thus, gives form to high-precision technologies through beautiful cutouts of female form in an artwork that measures 180cm×180cm×400cm.

 

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Under the event’s theme of ‘universe’, the brightly coloured suspended and rectangular installation focuses on throwing the spotlight back on Planet Earth and its people. It does this through multiple layers of 18,000 silhouettes of women in 100 different shades of colours — ranging from hues of blues and greens to reds and yellows — which represent the crowd in Ginza, a district in Tokyo, where the installation has been set up till the end of this month.

 

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‘I Am Here’ represents the busy streets of Tokyo, where people are always in a hurry to get somewhere — in a routine mundane fashion. The artist, through this installation, forces bystanders to take a pause and rethink where they belong in this crowd and question if are they simply lost or, if not, how are they different from the rest.

 

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Deep inside this installation of vibrant cut-outs of women are hidden silhouettes of two girls carrying a balloon and a cat, which encourage the visitors to play a little game of hide-and-seek on their own, and, subsequently, find themselves in this search.

 

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Emmanuelle’s colour installations, as always, is a showstopper that not just impresses the viewers with its use of colour and space but goes beyond and makes people question their lifestyle.