Zeynep Gülçur speaks with the artist about quantum mechanics, translating emotion, and editing as an act of surrender.
I first encountered Laure Prouvost’s work in 2018, when she took over the Palais de Tokyo with Ring, Sing and Drink for Trespassing. The first French artist to win the Turner Prize, Prouvost works across film, sculpture, installation and language. Rather than treating these as separate mediums, she sets them into dialogue. Humour, mistranslation and sensory experience are not thematic concerns but the operative logic of her practice.
Eight years later, I catch her by phone in Marseille. She’s serving on the jury at FIDMarseille and has stepped out of a screening during a short break. She tells me she was about to get a lemonade. Instead, she answers my call.
Our conversation begins with We Felt a Star Dying, her sprawling installation beneath the glass canopy of the Grand Palais. Originally conceived for Kraftwerk Berlin, the exhibition has transformed with its new setting, exchanging darkness for daylight while continuing its exploration of quantum physics and the more-than-human world.
From there, our conversation drifts through translation and artistic surrender, arriving at what happens when a work begins to take on a life of its own.
Zeynep Gülçur: Where are you in the world right now?
Laure Prouvost: I’m in Marseille at the FIDMarseille Festival—I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. It’s a great festival of experimental cinema, and I’m on the jury. So I was in the middle of a screening, and I’ve just stepped out. What about you? Are you based in France?
ZG: Yes! I was hiking in the mountains and just came back to Paris, actually.
LP: Oh, nice! Which part?
ZG: In eastern Turkey. We hiked to the summit of the fourth-highest mountain. It was hypnotic.
LP: Wonderful!
ZG: Speaking of being in Paris, I visited We Felt a Star Dying at the Grand Palais. Even without seeing the Berlin version, it felt like the same work revealing a different side of itself.
LP: Oh yes. It’s like day and night. More than day and night. It’s a complete evolution. She has to metamorphose completely. It’s like quantum, you know—it can exist in different states at the same time, in different places. The Beginning, the main sculpture, has to evolve with wherever she’s invited.
ZG: How was the process of adapting the work to the Grand Palais?
LP: At first, the piece was really made for a dark space. But then, when the Grand Palais invited us, I thought, There’s no way I’m going to cover the Grand Palais with black fabric. That doesn’t make sense. So we had to work with this stream of light. It became a new adventure. A new way of thinking.
ZG: It looks almost like a positive image of what was happening in Berlin.
LP: Yeah, exactly. It creates a very different effect on bodies and on the space. It became almost two different works belonging to one another.
ZG: I visited the exhibition with a notebook and resisted reading anything beforehand. I wanted the work to introduce itself.
LP: Oh, great.
ZG: My notes became increasingly unreliable. First note: alienesque octopus. Then the tentacle… is it a stingray? Or maybe an elephant’s trunk? The next thing I knew, I was putting my head inside one of the meteoroid helmets to find out where the smell was coming from. Was that the kind of imaginative drift you hoped to provoke in visitors?
LP: Yeah, I guess. The starting point was to create a feeling of deep connection with everything. It’s about this sense of quantum that we can’t articulate. We don’t have the right words. We know this quantum space is everywhere—a new way of seeing the world that isn’t mechanical anymore, that isn’t Newtonian. It’s the feeling that something is there, both visible and invisible.
The Beginning could be interpreted as an octopus, or as something from somewhere else. In Berlin, that feeling was very strong because everything happened in darkness. You would see this presence, and then it would disappear completely. Here, she’s floating above you. Sometimes she’s present, sometimes she disappears into the light, almost floating into the sky. It’s always quite cosmic. The helmets become almost like meteors that have gathered all kinds of things from the world. But they also carry the smell of a new possibility of being—a new system that’s in deeper connection with everything around us.
I love this idea in quantum mechanics—and in quantum computing—that something can exist in many states at the same time. We organise the world into sentences. We organise systems. It’s wonderful because it helps us communicate with one another. But at the same time, sometimes we lose the very basis of what it is to be together on this planet.
I don’t know if the work does this, but I hope anyone can be in different states and take from it whatever they wish—or not wish—to take. It has to stay very open for me. Absolutely not didactic, and absolutely not trying to explain science. It’s more about feeling something.
ZG: That really resonates. The moment I put my head into one of the helmets, I heard a voice saying: “We are the smell of the next person. We are the air you swallow.”
LP: We’re completely entangled, constantly. In quantum physics, a qubit is really about information spinning together. Qubits work in teams. They connect with one another to find solutions or create possibilities.
It’s fascinating to think that way. The separation of the individual becomes much more complex. There’s much more togetherness. There’s much more we. It makes sense when you think about breathing each other’s air.
It’s an artwork trying to translate feelings in many different ways—through sculpture, through sound, through smell, and through the film at its centre.
ZG: You describe your practice as an act of translation. Why translation?
LP: Translating emotion. Translating anxiety. Sadness. Happiness. But also trying to push…
At the moment, I’m really interested in imagination and joy as acts of resistance. Not simplifying the world. Keeping its complexity—or even pushing it towards greater complexity. A deeper world. I think imagination and joy will save us. And that’s through translation. Translation between one another. Translation of feelings.
ZG: One thing that stayed with me was that the exhibition asked us to move before it asked us to think. Before we understood anything intellectually, we were already walking, listening, smelling, lying down. Do you think the body understands before the mind does?
LP: That’s a really good question. I think the body has such power. We sense things, don’t we? We immediately click with certain people. You see someone’s face and something connects. So I completely believe in smell. Taste. Body sensations.
This piece was really about that. It was about sound tickling the brain. The sound tickling the building. Your body becoming part of it. You become almost like a qubit. You become this moving piece of metal. Your body actually makes the exhibition come alive.
So yes, I hope it’s first a bodily experience. Of course, it can also provoke thought. It can tickle the brain.
ZG: When you’re creating a work that brings together so many different media, how do you know what to edit? Or when to stop?
LP: I was talking with a student recently, and editing is really everything.
You have to articulate things more clearly. You can’t throw everything into the work. You have to be able to kill your darlings. Sometimes you’re deeply attached to an image, but within the whole, it no longer serves the work.
With this project, though, there was also a sense of losing control. We gave the film to a machine that translated it into what we called quantum images. As soon as we asked the machine to imagine what a quantum image might look like—instead of simply recognizing images our eyes already know—everything became less linear and much blurrier. There’s less separation between things. Those images appeared over the film in a random sequence as it played. So there was this strange balance between controlling the work and letting it go.
ZG: So at some point, editing became an act of surrender.
LP: Yeah. I found that really interesting. It was also an incredibly collaborative project. You need so many people to make a work like this come alive.
For the Grand Palais, we created two new fountains because I felt the work needed more liquidity in the space. It was summer. It felt almost as though a meteor had landed and created little ponds.
It’s always about making choices. About scale. About working with the space. How do you preserve the essence of both the work and the building? It’s a constant dance between many different elements. Again, it became another translation of the original installation.
If I’d simply been invited to make a completely new work for the Grand Palais, I don’t think this piece would have existed in this way. That’s what’s wonderful. It’s a kind of society offering an opportunity for evolution of a work that you couldn’t imagine yourself before.
The work starts growing without you. She becomes its own body. I’m almost swimming behind her… Trying to help her. Like she’s becoming her own entity.
ZG: And it’s still evolving.
LP: Exactly. Next, the work is going to Inhotim in Brazil. They’re actually building a pavilion especially for her. It’s kind of mad. To know that she’s going to continue growing… and that I’m there behind her, trying to give her the right space, trying to create the right environment for her.
ZG: That’s fascinating. I’ve actually been to Inhotim.
LP: You’ve been? Not many people have. It’s such a special place, isn’t it?
ZG: I was there about eight years ago. It’s one of the few museums where the relationship between the artwork and the landscape feels completely inseparable.
LP: It’s just incredible. It’s this beautiful kind of human madness. An extraordinary place of invention and creation, where art and nature exist completely together. Everything explodes into one another.
ZG: Listening to you, it sounds as though a work begins with intention, but then it starts growing beyond it. Does that feel true to your process?
LP: Exactly. You slowly grow into your practice. Then, almost, the practice overtakes you. You begin working for it. Very specific. Sometimes it feels like something bigger than ourselves.
ZG: Your work has its own recurring vocabulary—breast fountains, fish, water, invented words. I’m curious whether these motifs keep the same meaning over time, or do they evolve alongside the work?
LP: Years ago I made a whole body of work called Dit Learn (2017). It’s Dit Learn… say-and-learn… or de-learn… about unlearning.
I started assigning meanings to particular objects. The fish meant together. The breasts meant go this direction. A clementine meant love. A brush meant excited. A hammer meant no. It became a completely new symbolic language. Quite playful. When you encountered those objects, you gradually learned what they meant. So as a viewer, you had work to do. You had to participate. You had a new language to learn. That language has continued entering the practice.
You don’t have to know those earlier works, but of course those symbols still carry meanings for me. At the same time, they’re constantly changing. Depending on where the work is shown. Depending on the context.
The breast fountains now feel like gatherings of thoughts… Like material that gathers the world together. There’s also a strong sense of femininity. A sense of women’s power.
I don’t want to simplify it too much… But I think we need to hold on to everything our grandmothers made possible for us. And continue pushing freedom. Creation. For every species. So the body keeps returning. It always comes back.
ZG: When you’re working on a new piece, do you think about the viewer? Or do they only arrive afterwards?
LP: I think about the viewer all the time. Sometimes the work simply needs to happen by itself. But very often it’s a dialogue. A dance. An exchange.
Even my earliest films placed people in situations where they became part of the story. You’re no longer outside the work. You’re one of the protagonists.
I think every artwork needs a viewer to become complete. That’s what brings it alive. It’s always been about creating an exchange of thoughts. For me, that’s completely central.
ZG: And where does a new work begin for you? Do you already know where it’s going, or does it start with an image, a material, or an object?
LP: With this project, I had quite a clear structure from the beginning. I knew there were certain things I wanted to hold on to. Certain questions I wanted to articulate. Then I went looking for the images that could carry them.
Very often, though, everything begins with an invitation. This exhibition itself began with one. Someone opens a door… You walk through it… Then another path appears. Your imagination grows around it.
Sometimes I collect things from the street. Objects that catch my attention. They may later become part of another object. We’ve also made many works where fragments of human-made things and elements from nature slowly grow into one another. So sculpturally, ideas often begin with materials.
But I’m also a gatherer. I gather ideas. Images. Things I notice while walking. Then they slowly begin forming relationships.
A friend recently asked if I’d like to film in the Jardin des Tarots by Niki de Saint Phalle. And I thought, “Maybe…” Why not? Then your imagination starts growing around that possibility. I really love that. Of course, you also have to know what to accept… And what not to accept. What genuinely triggers something inside you.
ZG: After spending almost two years immersed in quantum physics, has it changed the way you think about creativity?
LP: Yeah. It’s been quite a journey. We spent so much time talking with scientists and philosophers. We were all searching for the right words because, in a way, you need an entirely new vocabulary. The words we already have belong to a different world. So it was incredibly challenging. And yes, it changed the way I look at the world.
When I was about twenty, I assisted an incredible artist who was also working with ideas around quantum physics, so perhaps the seed was already there. But to really engage with the subject—to make a work around it—definitely changed something.
I’m still running after time. It’s almost impossible to escape the structures we’ve been raised within. We still organise our lives around meetings, calendars, memories. Time remains the system we’ve collectively agreed upon. To truly live a quantum life, society itself would have to evolve. We would all have to change together. Slowly. And I don’t mean that in a prophetic sense.
Perhaps we’ll gradually move towards a world capable of holding greater complexity. That will take a long time. But I think it’s already meaningful just to begin talking about it. To try to articulate it. To feel it.
Many societies have always lived in much deeper connection with everything around them. Modern mechanical systems have given us extraordinary power, but they’ve also created a very particular way of seeing the world.
So we’re learning again. Relearning. Slowly. Little by little. It has certainly brought another layer of consciousness.
ZG: What are you curious about these days?
LP: [Laughing] Quantum… It’s still very much with me. I still can’t stop thinking about it.
But lately I’ve also become fascinated by the underwater world. Levitation. The feeling of floating. Keeping a certain distance from the weight that pulls us towards the ground.
One of the biggest questions for me is: How do we move beyond frontiers? How do we move beyond the limitations we’ve created?
I work between two languages. So I think a great deal about borders. But also about borders in a much broader sense. How do we cross the boundaries that separate people… Separate worlds… Separate ways of thinking? That’s really what I’m working on.
ZG: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.
LP: Thank you! It was so nice.
