Clément Pasquier

Temps Perdu
Temps Perdu is an immersive piece, at the boundary between bedroom and study, inspired by Marcel Proust’s bedroom and his work «In Search of Lost Time» in which it was written. A closed space where immobility becomes fertile. This intimate space is not a reconstruction, but a mental interpretation: that of a place frozen, absorbed by time. The room is entirely covered in sprayed cork (floor, walls, ceiling, furniture and accessories), until any hierarchy between architecture and objects is erased. Cork, derived from cork oak, is typical of the Mediterranean basin, making the link here between an imaginary and a heritage. This vernacular material linked to ancestral knowledge anchors the piece in its territory and pays it homage. Applied uniformly, it transforms the space into a total, almost unreal monochrome. This uniformity deliberately alters perception. Sight is blurred by the absence of contrasts. Sound is muffled by cork’s acoustic properties. Touch loses its bearings, each surface offering the same sensation. The visitor thus enters a space where the senses are deliberately disoriented, in the manner of a dream. Time seems suspended, frozen long ago, like a place forgotten in the folds of the subconscious. Temps Perdu can be read as a mental room, a fragment of Proust’s inner palace, where space becomes a projection support and psychic setting. The confinement, paradoxically, is neither endured nor chosen: it enables creation, gives meaning to the confinement. Through this piece, the project questions our relationship with time, memory and matter, by proposing a total sensory experience, silent and almost fantastical.