All posts tagged: Le Temple des Chartrons

The church has been closed for 30 years. If you wait long enough the natural world will overtake this temple, covering it with moss, wrapping it with ivy, filling it with trees.

Borondo is already there. “The columns are connected to trees,” he says as he projects a tall thin ghostly forest down the nave to the apse in preparation for his multimedia installation at the summer solstice.

As he researches this environment and the forests and gardens of Bordeaux the Street Artist is studying decay, growth, re-growth, and the dialogue between architecture and the world that preceded us.  

As he prepares the paintings, projections, and sounds he looks for the duality of our experiences as well – the fear and the attraction that a holy house can evoke, as well as an immense and thick forest, full of movement and stirring.

Who will fall to their knees here and cry it out to the sky first? “Merci !” “Mercy !”

See our first installment on “Merci” by Borondo here on BSA :

Borondo Begins Work in Bordeaux Temple for “MERCI”

Bientôt le temple ouvrira ses portes_Merci_Gonzalo Borondo Exhibition_Chartrons_Bordeaux Credits © Matteo Berardone/IG Bobelgom Graphic designer Oriana Distefano

Bientôt le temple ouvrira ses portes_Merci_Gonzalo Borondo Exhibition_Chartrons_Bordeaux Credits © Matteo Berardone/IG Bobelgom Graphic designer Oriana Distefano

Soon, the temple will open its doors.

We’re accustomed to watching artists interact with the unpredictable mood swings of Mother Nature when creating interventions in public space. Whether it is in the built environment of urban architecture or the crumbling remains of it in the city, followers of Street Art and graffiti are wise to anticipate the wild embrace of the sun, the winds, the floods, the fire, the ice, the snow. Now in the Bordeaux region of France people are preparing for the growing season.

The natural cycles are rarely invited indoors as part of an exhibit but this new artistic project of this summers’ MERCI by Gonzalo Borondo hopes to establish a healthy reverence for the revolutions and rotations of agronomy, history, mystery, and inspired variations of natural poetry.

“He is working indoors and outdoors in an attempt to create a dialogue with and in the streets of Bordeaux,” says project manager Silvia Meschino of the multi-stage installations that will pour into the temple as we near the grand opening precisely upon the summer equinox. “He has always tried to find a connection with the environment that surrounds him,” she says, and you recall his studied interventions of the past decade.

Today we bring you exclusive images and a teaser video of this first phase of Borondo’s adaptation in Le Temple des Chartrons. The old protestant church has been closed for thirty years but has been granted to the Spanish Street Artist/ muralist by the Bordeaux council so that he can freely create within it. We watch with interest as he creates his own version of sanctuary for visitors and of course, the natural world. Possibly the temple will achieve a balance.

Bientôt le temple ouvrira ses portes_Merci_Gonzalo Borondo Exhibition_Chartrons_Bordeaux Credits © Matteo Berardone/IG Bobelgom Graphic designer Oriana Distefano