Oh les beaux jours En attendant Godot Le dépeupleur La dernière bande
Table/CarteInstallation, carton, bois
Pavillon Bosio, Monaco
2022
When does a maquette become a work of art ?
For me, the most fascinating aspect of scenography is transforming a written text into a material image. Within this process, the scale model plays a fundamental role. It gives physical form to ideas while allowing me to construct, test, and negotiate scale.
A model is like a world.
On a long table, I arranged twelve scale models, each embodying my reflections on and interprtations of different dramatic texts-- from Greek traged and Shakespeare to twentieth-century modern drama. Together they form an imagined cartography.
Each model becomes a universal place : a tree, a garden, a fortest, a prison cell, a house, a basement... Together these places invite the viewer to move from one theatrical terrain to another, as though entering a landscape at the scale of the model. The twelve models, arranged across a single table, form a model in temselves-- a mise en abyme where each miniature world contributes to a larger fictional lanscape.
As viewers lean closer to observe the miniature chairs, trees, walls, and figures, they begin to see that these objects are more than ideas derived from theatre. They also exist as sculptures, each representing a fictional world.
---- Sisi Liu