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This summer, the esplanade in the Draï Eechelen park will feature the artwork Many dreams by the Luxembourg artist duo Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil. It is the first time this major sculpture will have been presented in Luxembourg after having been shown in Belgium (Beaufort04 - Triennale of Contemporary Art by the Sea) and France (in the park of the Château d’Avignon and at the Pavillon Vendôme – Centre d’art contemporain in Clichy). Taking the form of a shell of a 1950s bus in a synthetic material with the look of stone, the work merges in with the verdant park environment (that offers a panoramic view of Luxembourg city centre) as if time had gradually fossilized it. It invites us to experience the feelings that overcome us “when we are alone in front of the sea or a vast landscape.”
Artworks by Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil are always immersive, questioning the perception we have of external and internal spaces and thereby inviting us to undergo a perceptual experience of them before turning our gaze on our own desires and expectations. In 2011, with the installation Le Cercle fermé (2011) that was produced for the Luxembourg pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale and presented at Mudam during the exhibition Atelier Luxembourg (2012–2013), we had an accurate representation of the artists’ interest in the question of the perception of habitation spaces in both a material and a symbolic sense. In the case of Many dreams, Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil invite us to examine everyone's own mental space by particularly addressing the related themes of travel, the unknown and desire. It puts the viewer in a contemplative and paradoxical state by providing, as the artists point out, “a dreamlike vision of our aspirations mingled with their incompleteness, ultimately referring us back to the vulnerability of all things.”
