Eléonore Weber et Patricia Allio Natural Beauty Museum

The XXth century has produced its fair share of imaginary museums - physical spaces or products of our minds - inventing alternative models to the traditional exhibition space. With Natural Beauty Museum, Patricia Allio and Éléonore Weber have formulated a counter-utopia for the stage, in which the museum space becomes charged with real and virtual presences, diffracting the place of nature in our imagination. Inside this “Natural Beauty Museum” - where art has given way to the landscape - actor/visitors roam through the various strangely empty, peaceful rooms. During the visit, guests appear, and different interactive features click in - emotion intensifier devices, tactile panoramas, and landscape description generators...
During the course of this fantastical exploration, testimonies and other interventions gradually sound out the contradictions, upsetting the logic of taking delight in our contemplation of nature. Indeed, hidden behind the “pastoral” view lurks a disturbing form of strangeness, a sort of affliction affecting all levels of perception. By means of this specular and speculative museum, Allio and Weber pursue their documentary and analytical enterprise. After pinning down the various symptoms of the era, they turn them on their head and make them into performance-based propositions, bringing to the stage (and to crisis-point) the logic of normative discourse, its structure and shortfalls. By clinging to this new symptom that the two authors have termed as “landscape syndrome”, and of which we are all slight victims, Natural Beauty Museum takes a second look at how we relate to the norms of what see as beautiful, and our need for the sublime.