PARIS DESIGN WEEK
DISCOVERING THE LANGUAGE OF SCENOGRAPHY
PARIS AS A DESIGN LANDSCAPE
Arriving in Paris this September, it became clear that design here is less a discipline than a language; spoken across galleries, showrooms, institutions, and even in the city’s streets and architecture. Paris Design Week crystallized this impression: a constellation of encounters where heritage and experimentation converged, from the glassmaking traditions revisited at the Swedish Institute to the emancipatory echoes of disco at Lafayette Anticipations.
What struck me most was the role of scenography; the way spaces shaped encounters as much as the works themselves. From public installations in historical courtyards to experimental interiors at emerging galleries, scenography emerged as more than staging: it was the connective tissue of the week. This sensitivity extended beyond the official program, resonating with two of Paris’s major exhibitions; Wolfgang Tillmans at the Centre Pompidou and Vivian Suter at the Palais de Tokyo, both demonstrating scenography as artistic language in its own right.
What struck me most was the role of scenography; the way spaces shaped encounters as much as the works themselves. From public installations in historical courtyards to experimental interiors at emerging galleries, scenography emerged as more than staging: it was the connective tissue of the week. This sensitivity extended beyond the official program, resonating with two of Paris’s major exhibitions; Wolfgang Tillmans at the Centre Pompidou and Vivian Suter at the Palais de Tokyo, both demonstrating scenography as artistic language in its own right.
ABOUT PARIS DESIGN WEEK
Since its creation fifteen years ago, Paris Design Week has affirmed its singularity among European design weeks. From September 4–13, 2025, the event gathered professionals and design enthusiasts alike for its rentrée. The previous edition reached a record: 250,000 visitors and over 500 talents, spread across 375 venues.
The format resists centralization. Instead, design disperses into Paris’s living urban fabric; showrooms, boutiques, galleries, ateliers, restaurants, hotels, and historic sites. This plural approach reflects the city itself: a territory where design is embedded in daily gestures, objects, and experiences.
STARTING HIGHLIGHTS
At the Swedish Institute, Blazing Grace explored glassmaking as both archive and horizon. Translucent, fragile, and precise, glass became more than a medium: it was a metaphor for vision, identity, and cultural memory. At Lafayette Anticipations, Design Disco Club pulsed with a different rhythm; an ode to nightlife as community and emancipation. Disco was not invoked as a retro style but reclaimed as a cultural movement that expanded boundaries of identity and belonging.
Together, these exhibitions showcased how design can be a powerful tool by reactivating gestures of the past like craft traditions and emancipatory rituals. These two Design Week showcases seemed to serve as invitations to appreciate the new creative languages of today, successfully answering the expectations of any embarking visitor.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
PARIS IN SCENOGRAPHIC FRAGMENTS
As the site visits cumulated, Paris Design Week unfolded like a constellation across the city. One could move from gallery to boutique, from courtyard to museum, finding design embedded within the urban fabric.
A personal highlight was Spinning Around by Sophie Taille, installed in the courtyard of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. Nine rotating mirrors reframed the surrounding architecture, inviting the viewer to rediscover the site through shifting perspectives. Simple yet disarming, it embodied the power of scenography to alter perception and renew intimacy with place. On a sensorial level, this artistic framework led me to take active interest in parallel scenographic ideas.
Spinning Around by Sophie Taille
GSL GALLERY’S LE SALON DE SEPTEMBRE
Among the week’s most evocative scenographic statements was the reopening of GSL Gallery with Le Salon de Septembre. Located in a former factory in Paris’s northern suburbs, GSL is the venture of The Guild of Saint Luke.
Beneath immense industrial skylights, curator duo sashaXsasha reimagined the spirit of the 1903 Salon d’Automne through a sequence of domestic interiors; bedroom, kitchen & salon, where works were hung densely on fin-de-siècle inspired walls, above vitrines and patterned surfaces.
Designer Florence Provencher’s silverware and furniture glimmered within this saturated environment, conversing with layers of metaphysical history. The result was a gallery less like a neutral white cube than a total environment, oscillating between heritage and contemporaneity.
Beneath immense industrial skylights, curator duo sashaXsasha reimagined the spirit of the 1903 Salon d’Automne through a sequence of domestic interiors; bedroom, kitchen & salon, where works were hung densely on fin-de-siècle inspired walls, above vitrines and patterned surfaces.
Designer Florence Provencher’s silverware and furniture glimmered within this saturated environment, conversing with layers of metaphysical history. The result was a gallery less like a neutral white cube than a total environment, oscillating between heritage and contemporaneity.
This scenographic vision carried the signature of Edgar Jayet, who continues to attract attention for his explorations of past display languages. His approach reappeared at FAB Paris a week later, where he conceived the Young Talents stand after John Singer Sargent’s photographs of eclectic interiors.
In both cases, Jayet demonstrated how inherited codes of display can be fractured and renewed in the present ; an emerging scenographic voice now being recognized across the Paris cultural landscape.
@gslgallery
@florence_provencher
@sashaxsasha
@edgarjayet
In both cases, Jayet demonstrated how inherited codes of display can be fractured and renewed in the present ; an emerging scenographic voice now being recognized across the Paris cultural landscape.
@gslgallery
@florence_provencher
@sashaxsasha
@edgarjayet
SCENOGRAPHY BEYOND DESIGN WEEK
Simultaneously, two major institutional exhibitions reinforced this dialogue on space and perception.
At the Centre Pompidou, Wolfgang Tillmans expanded photography into architecture. In Nothing could have prepared us, Everything could have prepared us, images were arranged with a musical rhythm; sometimes monumental, sometimes scattered or intimate. Installed across the second floor, the works engaged directly with the traces of the former Information Library: carpets, desks, bookshelves and functional spaces (such as computer layouts and printing rooms).
Yet again, some additional constraints shaped the display: presence of asbestos in the museum’s infrastructure prevented drilling, which forced the setup to rely on clips and tape to exhibit Tillman’s hundreds of photographs. Ultimately this resulted in a raw yet precise scenography that emerged from instinct as much as from theory.
At the Centre Pompidou, Wolfgang Tillmans expanded photography into architecture. In Nothing could have prepared us, Everything could have prepared us, images were arranged with a musical rhythm; sometimes monumental, sometimes scattered or intimate. Installed across the second floor, the works engaged directly with the traces of the former Information Library: carpets, desks, bookshelves and functional spaces (such as computer layouts and printing rooms).
Yet again, some additional constraints shaped the display: presence of asbestos in the museum’s infrastructure prevented drilling, which forced the setup to rely on clips and tape to exhibit Tillman’s hundreds of photographs. Ultimately this resulted in a raw yet precise scenography that emerged from instinct as much as from theory.
At the Palais de Tokyo, Vivian Suter’s DISCO transformed canvases into a proliferating ecosystem. Nearly 500 paintings cascaded and overlapped beneath the Grande Verrière, echoing the artist’s Guatemalan garden where they were conceived.
The exhibition embraced chance and multiplicity: works without titles or chronology draped and swayed like a jungle of colour. Scenography here was abundance itself; a lived environment closer to the street than to the sanctity of a museum.
Together, these exhibitions reframed scenography not as backdrop but as language: one that disciplines, liberates, and redefines how we encounter images, objects, and space.
@centrepompidou
@wolfgangtillmans
@palaisdetokyo
The exhibition embraced chance and multiplicity: works without titles or chronology draped and swayed like a jungle of colour. Scenography here was abundance itself; a lived environment closer to the street than to the sanctity of a museum.
Together, these exhibitions reframed scenography not as backdrop but as language: one that disciplines, liberates, and redefines how we encounter images, objects, and space.
@centrepompidou
@wolfgangtillmans
@palaisdetokyo
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
EXHIBTION CATALOGUE
PARIS AS A STAGE
What emerges from these crossings is a vision of Paris itself as a stage. The city does not only design objects but choreographs perceptions, gestures, and communities. From the emancipatory pulse of disco to the quiet rigor of glass, from mirrors in a courtyard to cascades of painting, scenography wove the thread that connected experiences across the city.
For me, Paris Design Week was less about discovering individual works than about awakening a new sensitivity: it opened my eyes to the centrality of scenography in how exhibitions are experienced. More than a backdrop, scenography revealed itself as a language in its own right ; one capable of disciplining, liberating, and reshaping the way we encounter art and design.
For LA DÉRIVE, this first Paris editorial is less a review than a declaration: to read the city through its scenographies, through the ways it frames and reframes culture in motion. Now with the start of Fashion Week, the dialogue continues; exploring another scenography where identity, performance, and collective imagination unfold.
Stay tuned !
WORDS: Solveig Wilson Carrier
@solveigcarrier
@solveigcarrier
2025
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