Théo Mercier, art installation place Graslin

This proudly self-taught artist works across sculpture, performance, and site-specific installation. His practice is driven by an obsession with matter in transformation: waste that becomes organism, objects that mutates, and architecture that “breathes”. He creates visual fictions where past and present erode one another, often with a touch of humour and the uncanny.

For Place Graslin, Théo Mercier has turned to sand: a material central to his sculptural work and used here outdoors for the first time. On the forecourt outside the neoclassical opera house, he imagines a slow, geological eruption: a wave of compacted sand in the form of giant ammonites bursts from the ground, carrying half-buried cars and piles of rubble. The rubble comes from Nantes construction sites, while the cars evoke a recent past when the square was still open to traffic.

Altered opera excerpts emerge from each vehicle, maintaining a sonic link with the building overlooking the square. Fossil Opera becomes a dizzying stratigraphy in which the sand of our constructions, the debris of our demolitions, and the cars of our modern age lie buried together before being brought back into the light.