Hair’mèches

Les Escales culturelles

Saturday 24 June 2023, 3pm to 8pm, Cité Pierre-Feuillère
Saturday 1 July 2023, 3pm to 6pm, Place du Moulin-Fondu
Saturday 8 July 2023, 3pm to 8pm, Esplanade Simone-Veil

The artistic programme of La Galerie, Centre for contemporary art of national interest in Noisy-le-Sec extends beyond its walls, spreading throughout the city with artists’ projects designed to engage with local residents. Each summer during the Escales culturelles de Noisy-le-Sec, the centre invites an artist to conceive a work that offers everyone, young and old, a unique experience, sensory and accessible, that encourages encounters and sharing.

Maxime Rossi (born 1980, lives and works in Paris) is an orchestral conductor who removes barriers between genres and brings together forms that may initially seem to have nothing in common: burlesque and art history, brass bands and opera, hamburgers and philosophy.

For Hair’mèches,* Maxime Rossi is revisiting a project presented in 2020, an inflatable structure and performances, simultaneously a stage, a hair salon and meeting place. As part of Noisy-le-Sec’s Escales culturelles and La Galerie’s touring programme, this multifaceted installation offers a singular experience engaging sight, hearing and touch. 

An imposing, oversized symbol, the seven-metre high inflatable beckons the public: it represents Oreste, a character conceived by the Italian cartoonist Renato Calligaro for the anti-fascist volume Rosso e no (1973). In the first stage, Oreste is presented flat for a group drawing workshop. The character is then revealed at his full height, sitting with legs crossed, flipping through a newspaper, a waiting position. It is a posture you’d find in a hair salon, a place of informal meetings and conversations, where the latest political news, sporting exploits, public figures and the vagaries of daily life are discussed in concert. But with Hair’mèches the salon becomes a stage element, within which a sensory sound installation unfolds: a hairdresser gives you a makeover to operatic arias sung by an opera singer to the accompaniment of a saxophonist. 

* Many hair salons in France use wordplay in their names: pronounced in French, “hair’mèches” is a homonym for “Hermès”; additionally, “mèches” can be translated as “strands”.