LABAYE • SUMI — FRAC Ile de France

Scenography for the exhibition Berserk & Pyrrhia

DATE
22.03 – 20.07.25

SITE
Le Plateau, Paris
Les Réserves, Romainville

TEAM
Commissioner : Céline Poulin
Associate Commissioner : Camille Minh-Lan Gouin
Scientific Consultant : Michel Huynh, conservateur général, Musée de Cluny – Musée National du Moyen Âge
Exhibition produced in collaboration with the Musée de Cluny – Musée National du Moyen Âge Paris

The medieval heroic fantasy imagery of pop culture inhabits the worlds of today’s artists.
The exhibition Berserk & Pyrrhia makes visible the circulation of medieval images and their later appropriation, and brings together medieval and contemporary art. Medieval works are on display at Le Plateau and Les Réserves, thanks to loans from the rich collections in the Parisian region, creating an inter-generational and trans-historical dialogue.
At Le Plateau, in the spirit of Berserk, and with reference to the more mystical and romantic nineteenth-century interpretation of the medieval period, the works take us on a dark and brooding journey. At Les Réserves, they draw their references from the wonder and anthropomorphism of medieval bestiary, transporting us into the world of Pyrrhia, underscoring the importance of craftsmanship and community ties.

An exhibition produced in collaboration with the Musée de Cluny – Musée National du Moyen Âge.

Fragments of the Past, Forms of the Present

The installation designed by the architect-artist duo Labaye Sumi explores medieval furniture as a mobile structure, and questions medieval architecture through its principles of accumulation and addition.

In the same approach, historical pieces and contemporary works dialogue on an equal footing.
Each object, whatever its status, rests on a simple tray, asserting a minimal and essential presentation that erases temporal distinctions to better reveal formal and conceptual resonances.

Covering all the exhibition supports with raw burlap, the artists transform this vegetable fiber into a unifying surface, evoking the trunk – both container and vector of movement.

Between the Plateau and the Réserves, three ‘pieces of architecture’ emerge: inhabited micro-spaces, housing reading stands, lighting and sculptural seating.
At the crossroads of furniture and sculpture, these habitable forms replay the codes of the baldachin, liturgical furniture, the throne and the work chair.

In this contemporary reinterpretation of medieval architectural vocabularies, the purity of Romanesque lines dialogues with the vertical momentum of the Gothic, where spatiality unfolds more through suspended ceiling elements than through walls, establishing a plastic language where the strata of past and present intertwine.