Client: Cité de la Mode et du Design

Overview

Text(e)~Fil(e)s is an artwork/installation specially created by artist Pascal Dombis for the Cité de la Mode et du Design içn Paris. It is a monumental, 140-meter-long ribbon made up of outgrowths of different sizes of tens of thousands of lines of text (literary, political, poetic…) related to Fashion, by a number of different authors: Aragon, Balzac, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Molière, Proust, Voltaire, Zola, and many more…

Goals

Text(e)~Fil(e)s is around various issues raised by Fashion (moral, esthetic, sociological…) that the artist offers visitors a unique sensory promenade, with an immersion into these lines of text.
Using algorithmic calculations, Dombis expands these texts on a variety of scales, thus creating a visual experience built around a sense of immersion, vertigo and excess. Visitors can walk along this vast ribbon of text and discover this piece through a continual reading all along the passageway, or, instead, can freely choose to divert their gaze by jumping from one text to another, creating their own non-linear version, moving forward with a new perception that contains their own discoveries and considerations.

Additional Information

In a variant of The Work of Art in the Era of Reproduction, Walter Benjamin distinguishes between two modes of painting: vertical painting, and one « which reproduces the world so that man may concretely walk there ». Such is the Text(e)~Fil(e)s: you may walk, read and dream there. From Fashion Passage/ Passing Fashions by Christine Buci-Glucksmann