The Ball Theater was designed by the architecture studio
Muoto, led by
Yves Moreau and
Gilles Delalex, to create an architecture that offers visitors an experience that is simultaneously spatial, aesthetic, and acoustic. For, according to
Lesley Lokko, today it is no longer the role of architecture to represent or to be represented as an image.
Architecture needs to be real, tangible, and concrete, to become the place where life, society, and the future are experienced! Architecture is no longer something to be avoided. It needs to be made and experienced. It is time to stop looking backward, as most exhibitions do, and to look, forwards. It is time to write the next chapter.
The installation was designed to offer visitors a space to imagine a more utopian future. With its globe shape, the theater immediately recalls the architecture of the revolution or of the Russian constructivists. Its smooth and continuous outline gives it a utopian aura that represents a world in miniature, this terrestrial globe that we are now ever more aware of sharing, with its meridians and its parallels.
The shape of the theater is an invitation to look forward again, beyond crises. In a time of emergency, austerity, and climate anxiety, this theater delivers a message: let us awaken the utopia within us! Let us allow ourselves moments of discovery and euphoria.
Ball Theater by Muoto. Photograph by Schnepp Renou.
Ball Theater by Muoto. Photograph by Schnepp Renou.
Imagine it’s party time
The theater’s shape can be interpreted equally as a terrestrial globe or as a mirror ball, a kitsch icon of an era when partying was still possible. This party aura suggests a new approach to today’s crises, one where the emphasis is no longer on emergencies, but on the possibility of imagining somewhere and something different. This is enacted in the life of the theater for the duration of the Biennale Architettura 2023 by the alternation between moments of contemplative immersion in a soundscape echoing with foreign and far-off voices, and periods of intense occupation and activity based on variations on the theme of the “ball”, an interplay of workshop-residencies involving artists, researchers, and students.
An intriguing experiment
The installation intrigues visitors by placing them at the center of a stage that prompts risk-taking, speech, gesture, and intervention. It is not the typical theater of illusion characterized by the face-to-face between actors and the audience, but a theatrical setting designed for experimentation. A stage that delivers an experience that challenges. Which does not so much provide answers as raise questions. Where did this half-sphere come from? Who lives in it? What is it for? How did it get there? What are the fragments of voices, whisperings, and radio static that emanate from these loudspeakers saying? Has it just landed or is it about to take off? These are questions we ask ourselves in an uncertain world: should we stay grounded or take off? Should we get close to things, create new communities, erase distances and distinctions, or conversely withdraw and remain aloof? How to choose? How do we reinvent our relationship with this world in quest of a future? And how do we readdress the question of ecology, in a fundamental way, by means of architecture, and not against or despite it?
