Simon Fujiwara, the artist who steals the roses of the Centre Pompidou

 

Simon Fujiwara is a brilliant storyteller. His beautiful sculpture titled “New Pompidou”, currently on show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in occasion of the “Nouveau Festival”, is at the same time a replica of an element of the museum’s structure (called gerberette) and an icon of the Pompidou itself, a living fragment of all the narratives and stories behind the creation of the museum.

Rumors say that during the Eighties the Centre Pompidou’s director, Pontus Hulten, thought to construct an exact copy of the Centre Pompidou, with the same repeating kit of parts as the original structure. In 2000, during his first trip to Paris, a young Simon Fujiwara stole a rose from the Georges Café, that is the museum’s extraordinary rooftop café. In front of this impressive building the artist promised to himself never to become an architect.

Now the stolen rose has come back to Paris, and the artist had the occasion to build his own Centre Pompidou. Hosted in the building of the Galeries Lafayette Foundation in Rue du Plâtre in the Marais, only 150 meters far from the Centre Pompidou, Simon Fujiwara has started to collect the roses discarded by the Georges Café. He has also been gathering an encyclopedia of images recalling the shape of the museum as well as stories about the building, its structures, its status, unearthing a metaphoric, philological and historical “swap”. That of the Marais. From this “swap” and with this “swap” Fujiwara created the ‘Gerberette’, his personal “New Pompidou” icon, embodying private tales and public histories.

July 18, 2015