CeCiL’s Box by Nika Schmitt

With the CeCiL's Box, the Cercle Cité supports local creation by presenting and promoting the work of emerging and young artists from the Greater Region in one of its shop windows in the Rue du Curé. This mini exhibition space, visible 7 days a week, day and night, offers a street-side location in the heart of the city to a series of original and ephemeral interventions from the plastic and applied arts, with the aim of arousing the curiosity of passers-by and questioning the collective imagination.

The 34^th intervention, entrusted to artist Étienne Duval, is entitled moth.

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Contrary to initial assumptions, the moth does not fly towards the light, but tilts its back to where it is brightest. Trapped by evolutionary instincts, the moth gets caught in endless loops around artificial light beams. Installed at CeCiL's box, the electromechanical system ‘moth’ holds the end of an endoscope camera with which it repeatedly scans the inside of the confined space. In circles, across the window, the system reflects in real time the inner corners of the window, the texture of the dust and occasionally details of the street outside the box. “Like a moth flying into a flame”, the system is interrupted by the brightness, changing its movement pattern and lingering in bright areas. By generating light at the top of the camera itself, it occasionally influences its own movement patterns through its own reflection in the window. The viewer becomes the object of observation and at the same time part of the system as a moving entity blocking the original light source. The light from outside becomes the orchestrator of the endless kinetic performance inside CeCiL's Box.

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We invite you to meet-up with the artist in front of the CeCiL's Box on Thursday October 3 at 12:00.

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