{"id":134361,"date":"2026-04-09T12:19:49","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T10:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.levoyageanantes.fr\/oeuvres\/titre-en-attente-theo-mercier\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T15:52:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T13:52:15","slug":"fossil-opera","status":"publish","type":"oeuvre","link":"https:\/\/www.levoyageanantes.fr\/en\/artworks\/fossil-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"Fossil Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Place Graslin, Th\u00e9o Mercier has turned to sand: a material central to his sculptural work and used here outdoors for the first time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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 \u201cbreathes\u201d. He creates visual fictions where past and present erode one another, often with a touch of humour and the uncanny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Place Graslin, Th\u00e9o 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\t<\/div><\/section>\n\t

Th\u00e9o Mercier was born in 1984 in Paris, where he lives and works. He is represented by galerie mor charpentier (Paris, Bogot\u00e1) and is an associate artist with the CCN Ballet national de Marseille, which receives support by the French Ministry of Culture.
\nArtist’s Instagram account.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>\t

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