Since Monday, 140 workers, including 95 rope access technicians, have been working on deploying the fabric strips on each of the facades of the Arc de Triomphe, Place de l'Étoile-Charles de Gaulle. 25?000 m 2 of bluish-silver fabric belted with 3,000 meters of red rope will completely cover the building on the Champs-Elysées and transform the Parisian monument into an ephemeral work of Christo.
A work of art finally posthumous
The artist couple - Christo Vladimiroff Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, commonly known as Christo - had imagined this gigantic packaging in 1961.
Postponed twice in 2020 due to the nesting period of the kestrels and then the health crisis, the completion of the work The Arc de Triomphe packaged will finally be posthumous, Christo Vladimiroff Javacheff, widower since 2009, having left us in May 2020 at the age of 84 years.
The Arc de Triomphe as a living object
"It will be like a living object that will come alive in the wind and reflect the light. The folds will move, the surface of the monument will become sensual. People will want to touch the Arc de Triomphe described Christo during the presentation of his project.
The ephemeral work will be visible from Saturday, September 18 to Sunday, October 3. The dismantling, which will begin on October 4, will end on November 10 at the latest.
This 14 million euro project is entirely financed, like all of Christo's monumental projects, by the sale of the couple's original works. The materials used for the packaging, fabric and rope, are recyclable polypropylene.
Packaging aesthetics criticized
But The Arc de Triomphe packaged does not escape the usual criticism of industrial packaging.
Carlo Ratti, architect and friend of Christo, calls, in an article in the World to give up "the aesthetics of high-waste packaging" . "Unlike the great wars of the twentieth century, the climate crisis of the twenty-first century has failed to shake people's minds sufficiently, he said Saturday in the daily newspaper. As we seek to emerge from a society of overconsumption in the West, we must abandon the aesthetics of high-waste packaging."
The Arc de Triomphe, a monument twice completely covered
The Arc de Triomphe has only very rarely been "wrapped". The monument had been partially hidden during its inauguration on July 29, 1836, notably to reveal the name tables visible under the small vaults, and during the funeral of the writer Victor Hugo on June 1, 1885, a black crepe veil covering the top of the monument.
And in 1989, the French artist Catherine Feff had covered the scaffolding with tricolored nets during the restoration work. "However, the packaging of the Arc de Triomphe by Christo and Jeanne-Claude will allow this time to perfectly fit the silhouette of the monument underlines the Centre des monuments nationaux.
The artists have also created many other gigantic packaging projects, including the Pont-Neuf in Paris in 1985 and the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995.
