Toguna Project - Tokyo Palace

Project supported and funded by the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation.

Collaboration of Pierre-Henri Beyssac for the design and realization of the marquetry.

The term "Toguna" refers to an open construction usually erected in the center of the Dogon villages (Mali) along the Bandiagara cliff; the low height of this building is wanted, so as to force dialogue sitting, without ever coming to the hands.

Thick layers of millet stems forms the roof, like so many strata of accumulated knowledge. It is a community place where the words of the elders are passed on and potential conflicts are addressed. It is this architecture that has served as a symbolic referent for the development of a new venue within the Palais de Tokyo. The Toguna was first imagined as a great landscape to survey, to visit. It is an immersive work, at the same time observatory of the various know-how summoned and experimental material that interrogates our relationship to the transmission by overflowing the classical form of the amphitheater.

The project /

Facing the stone-cardboard bedside of François-Xavier Richard, Obsideo is a vast cork bench, "a pile of cork blocks like a crystallized eruption, both seated and ambulatory", in the words of its creators, designer Dimitry Hlinka and marquetry Pierre-Henri Beyssac. The Latin verb obsideo means "occupy a place, besiege, block, invest". Through a modular system based on the identical dimensions of expanded cork blocks, Dimitry Hlinka and Pierre-Henri Beyssac invest the space following an orthonormal plan. The very precise accumulation of the modules forms a vast geometrical and dark landscape, on which a marquetry motif of colored "stone leaves" stands out in contrast. The lines formed by the stone on the vertical and horizontal cork planes emphasize the lines of force that structure the whole, operating smoothly the passage from one material to another.

Manufacturing / Dimitry Hlinka - Pierre-Henri Beyssac - Palais de Tokyo. Marquetry design / Pierre-Henri Beyssac.

Valchromat, expanded cork, quartzite, mica, rollrost.

Dimensions: L 15x W 6.70x H 2.10 meters.

© Alexandra Babonneau / All rights reserved.