Qui es-tu Peter?

Louis Vuitton

Last week I stopped by Louis Vuitton‘s flagshipstore at Champ’s Elysée. But I didn’t step in through the regular entrance, instead I went to the back of the building at 60 Rue de Bassano and took the dark elevator with no lighting to the last floor just to step into the on-going exhibition “Qui es-tu Peter?” (Who are you Peter?). It was definately not the way Disney presented this child who-never-wanted-to-grow-up in the Disney cartoon years ago. This exhibition that was made by 13 artists showed the darker side of being Peter Pan, the fear and anguish of a childhood.

The installation that touched me the most was Melonie Foster Hennessy‘s “Qui a le temps de grandir?????? (Who has time to grow up???) It was a 4-d installation where you could take part of a conversation between Peter Pan and Wendy. Peter Pan, still a child who refused to grow up and who had chosen eternity and Wendy that had grown older and now was a married woman. The meeting/conversation between Peter and Wendy is a bit tense, the time is ticking, while Peter still doesn’t change when it comes to aging Wendy is getting older and older until she explodes into stardust with the ending line:“Dying would be an awfully big adventure”. Wendy became a star, and a star is how children transform their loved-ones that are dead….

Address & date: Oct 1st-January 9th 2011 @ Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton 60 Rue de Bassano (in the corner of 101 avenue des Champs-Élysées)