Stéphane Thidet’s installations invite visitors inside a fictional, poetic universe that transforms whatever space he touches into a dreamlike narrative. Rideau (“Curtain”) is a massive waterfall covering the entire façade of Théâtre Graslin that crashes down onto the theatre’s front steps before eventually flowing into a massive basin designed as potential extension to the theatre.
For Nantes’ Théâtre Graslin, Stéphane Thidet designed Rideau : a metaphor for the eponymous theatrical device that both masks artifice and reveals a spectacle. In doing so, it refers as much to the creative activity taking place inside the theatre as it does to the layout of Place Graslin, which was designed by architect Mathurin Crucy to be an “urban theatre” where the identical façades across from it make up the seats from which onlookers can “watch” it.
By using the sheer force of falling water, Thidet immerses visitors in a state of ambivalent contemplation, somewhere between a dream and the fear that nothing could ever domesticate this untameable force.
