A parody of a baroque feast

MANILA, Philippines - Palais d’Iéna is a forgotten 1930s Modernist building, of which, for a short period each year, little is known about what happens inside. For 24 hours only, this cavernous concrete nave transforms itself, never to witness again the over-the-top kitsch display of a “total museum” with classical “sculptures.”

Social laboratory

A collaboration between Prada, the AMO-architectural think-tank of Rem Koolhaas and artist Francesco Vezzoli, 24 hours museum selects historic Palais d’Iéna, which now houses the Conseil Économique, Social et Environnemental, transforming into something that looks like A Clockwork Orange meets Studio 54, unfolding simultaneously in 24 hours, in pure ephemerality.

For 24 hours museum, AMO created a “non-existent museum” reflecting the museum’s role as a social laboratory with three curatorial directions: the historic, contemporary and the forgotten. Divided into three installations instead of one single type of exhibition space, the result is fragmented, just like the statues formed out of collages of weird magazine cutouts of female iconography, on top of marble podiums. Round-the-clock graphics figure, like the halo of a saint, but with an hour hand sweeping its 24-hour turn to psychedelic “statues” with 2-D “like” buttons.

Chic check-in: Very round and fairly inaccessible with a lot of security checks, Miuccia Prada rediscovers the 1930s Palais d’Iena.

Mimesis remix

Francesco Vezzolli is no Cinderella bumpkin. This Torinese native and art citizen of the world grew up with a disco ball aesthetic, alluding to the decidedly bad taste of pink neon cages for his fake retrospective (the “experimental” part of the installation) where guests dine surrounded by his statues.

From recreating Caligula to a nonexistent fragrance launch with actual celebrities, Vezzoli’s repertoire enlists the red carpet Oedipus complex night visions and then some mimetic reflection (if you choose to see beyond the surface), in our YouTube fame-obsessed times.

For Parisiens, it may be a weird Dutch-Italo takeover of a forgotten French institution — strange but certainly powerful. As they say, institutions are parodies of grandeur with an unspeakable burden of origin. It is a world rediscovered from a context already gone. And perhaps Miuccia (behind the curtains) and her cast show us it is ready for remixing and updating.