Michel Paysant

Michel Paysant (b. 1955, Bouzonville) develops works that can be situated somewhere between art and science. This work takes the form of an ‘encephalogram’, an image which records the structure or electrical activity of the brain. Paysant’s image reveals the activity of the eye during sleep, describing it in a graphic trace. With his installation Nusquam (lat.: nowhere), Michel Paysant tackles the themes of the hospitality, of the other and emigration, through a free and poetic vision of the notion of “country of asylum”. Inspired by Utopia by Thomas More (1516), Nusquam should be considered as “an active waiting room”, an intermediary space where one can relax, in which one submerges oneself and where one can listen. Thus, Nusquam represents a fictional threshold of a different world, the foundations of which are anchored in an open conception of Europe. This assembly of various elements, which is the fruit of a close collaboration with different partners, combines numerous literary, historical and symbolic references and is reminiscent of baroque curiosity cabinets.