More than thirteen meters high, a canopy spanning five meters, aluminum branches covered with nearly 110,000 sparkling leaves… The tree that Joana Vasconcelos is about to plant in the chapel of the Château de Vincennes does not will not go unnoticed. This monumental work should cause as much sensation as the one that revealed it to the general public during the Venice Biennale in 2005. During this event, the artist burst onto the art scene with a chandelier, titled The Bride, “La Fiancée”, whose glassware was replaced with feminine stamps!
The feminist message of this mythological episode, which sees a woman refuse union with a god to preserve her freedom, had everything to seduce Joana Vasconcelos. Don’t his works, almost all of them, carry an emancipatory discourse? We are thinking here of her monumental Marilyn pumps made of kitchen instruments or of this helicopter adorned with feathers which could have allowed Marie-Antoinette to escape her “all mapped out” destiny.
The France-Portugal year, organized last year by the French Institute, allowed him to bring out this idea of ??sculpture from his boxes… by enlarging it a little. “During the confinement, I had asked my assistants to make fabric foliage at home, just to keep busy. I knew that one day or another this tree would eventually see the light of day,” she recalls. The order, placed by the Center des Monuments Nationaux, to install one of his sculptures within the walls of the Château de Vincennes hastened things.
“Installing this tree within the chapel itself seemed obvious to me when I became aware of the motifs represented by its stained glass windows,” adds Joana Vasconcelos. The Holy Chapel (which despite its name has, in fact, never been made sacred) is one of the few churches in France to evoke scenes from the Apocalypse in its stained glass windows. “I found it interesting to take the opposite view of this description of the end of the world by introducing on the spot an element taken from Genesis,” she continues.
A direct allusion to the “tree of knowledge” of the Garden of Eden, from which Eve ends up picking the forbidden fruit, this vegetal motif opens a door to questions that are dear to the artist. “The tree figure is extraordinarily powerful. Symbolically, its branches respond symmetrically to its roots. Its trunk is like a link between heaven and earth. It carries within it the three dimensions that I explore in my work: the physical world, the mental universe and this spiritual sphere that occupies a large part of my life,” she slips. While her work does not copy any particular essence, the fact that her fabric and leather foliage has small burls clearly reflects this spiritual concern, she says.
This dialogue with the trees, Joana Vasconcelos will in any case be able to continue it, in the coming weeks, in the park of the Waddeston manor in the United Kingdom. In this large property, near Oxford, Lord Jacob Rothschild asked him to install another monumental work: a Wedding Cake (or “wedding cake”), which is to be inaugurated on June 8th. This giant pastry, not in cream but in ceramic, has a circular staircase in its center that allows you to climb twelve meters high and dominate the surrounding forests. “The idea was to transform visitors into these little characters that sit on top of the wedding receptions. But we can also chat with the trees from up there,” she concludes.
