Être Absorbé

Maison Ruinart · an artwork by Mouawad + Laurier · 2024 · Maison Ruinart, Reims

Our role Concept, sculpture, tracking, generative music, light and LEDs, real-time software, installation.

Être Absorbé extends Retour aux Sources. With the same device, enriched with a root reaching out towards us, the work explores a relationship with the living where the visitor no longer only contemplates and feels, but becomes an actor. After the climate disruption observed in Retour aux Sources, Être Absorbé invites movement and interaction.

The visitor enters into resonance with the root and becomes a living element of the work. Through their movements they influence light and sound, following a narrative they do not fully control. Like a drop absorbed by the immensity of the sea, they melt into an exchange with living matter: they discover their own vulnerability and, in union with nature, their immense strength.

Être Absorbé reminds us that nature is not foreign to us. It perceives us, answers us and takes us in. An invitation to abandon any posture of superiority and reconnect with our roots, to listen to what vibrates in us, around us and with us.

Ruinart wanted to make the work interactive. Five years after the first root, we evolved a permanent installation without stopping it: a RealSense tracking camera, a small added root, and a new layer of interaction and narrative grafted onto the existing brain. A work built to last can also grow.