Vivien Roubaud - Suspended Time

With this solo exhibition, Vivien Roubaud occupies the Pavillon, center for art and technological experimentation, to unfold a dialogue where technique and poetry intertwine. Repurposed objects, disrupted flows, invisible phenomena: everything seeks a point of equilibrium without ever settling. Temps Suspendu (Suspended Time) brings together a constellation of installations - motors, sensors, hybrid structures - assembled like fragments of a visual and sonic language.

Roubaud explores the margins of technology, where machines appear hesitant and vulnerable. Far from any logic of efficiency, his installations wear, stumble, and reveal latent gestures, barely perceptible pulses. In The Creepers - Multifunction Printer, Ball Bearing, Controller (2022), reassembled printers turn awkwardly on themselves: the trajectory of colored marks transforms writing into organic spirals, letting chance draw an unexpected visual landscape. The titles of his works almost always enumerate their constituent elements: a deliberately literal protocol highlighting an assembly where every component counts. Freed from their assigned function, these repurposed objects propose other ways of world making and invite the viewer to reconsider what production means. Roubaud’s machines do not aim for efficiency: they consume, breathe, and exhaust themselves.

Inflatables, Crystal Chandeliers, Rotating Collector, Twenty-Four Volts (2024 – 2025) gathers old chandeliers enclosed in plastic spheres. They rotate in circles, in rhythm – sometimes calm, sometimes frenzied – while Fireworks, Degassed Petroleum Gel, Incomplete Combustion, PMMA Tube (2014 – 2025) freezes traces of ephemeral energy in a polymerized gel. Under the Pavillon’s dome, Four Cables, Brake, Motor, Survival Blanket, 48 Volts (2025) sculpts the air and its density. The clicks, rustles, and collisions mingle with their movements, revealing forces usually imperceptible to the naked eye.

A fascination with the living emerges in the subtle, sensitive vibrations of certain works: the butterfly wings animated by shape-memory wires in Scales, Nickel, Titanium, Copper, Glass, Twelve Volts (2021), or a maple seed in Stationary Samara AEC (2023) floating in a continuous airflow, extend the rhythm of nature.

The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of unusual moments where wonder arises through repurposing: in the suspension of a tarp, the breath of a motor, a pause between gestures. The Pavillon becomes a site of technological indiscipline, a porous space where Roubaud shifts boundaries. Between art and engineering, use and fiction, control and letting go, the artist asserts an aesthetic of dysfunction. Not chaotic, but generative, it opens poetic gaps that invite new forms of attention.