GLASS SKIN 165*357

CENTRE POMPIDOU PARIS  I  FRANCE 2025

A ritual of stripping an poetic disobedience at the Centre Pompidou Museum., as part of BECAUSE x BEAUBOURG and La Main Jaune.

Performative Installation composed of 33 polyester films with ionized metal layers, e 165 × 357cm each, extracted from the glass facade of the Centre Pompidou, Paris 2025.

“We skinned the Centre Pompidou”  declares Stéphane Malka

A nocturnal, spontaneous, then claimed action.
We came like graffiti writers, from the wastelands, outside the frame.
We finished at dawn, hands that stuck, hands that created.

We stripped the glass façade bare, tearing away the building’s skin.
A black solar film stretched for nearly half a century to filter the light and protect the artworks.
A gesture made with bare hands.

That night, Paris finally penetrated the museum.
The façade stopped defending itself.
What fell to the ground, those black, crumpled, living, sensual fragments, became art in turn.
The violent gesture was a liberation.
A shedding.
A necessary act of poetic vandalism.
The building surrendered itself to the light.

In prelude to its closure, the museum turned itself inside out.
It opened before disappearing.
Since its inauguration in 1977, no perspective had ever shown the Centre Pompidou like this: naked, vulnerable, intensely alive.

It called for a poetic disobedience.
A free and physical gesture that questions the relationship between power, matter, and light.

This skin bears the scars of time.
The imprint of the place.
This technical, invisible material becomes the raw substance of an installation, an architectural ready made born from an act of tearing and revelation.
Not so anonymous after all: it had protected thousands of artworks, absorbed decades of breath, heat, dust, and gazes. Its memory was already a material.

Once detached and autonomous, this deep, almost liquid black captured the light, held it, bent it. What once filtered now reveals itself as a fragmented landscape, a topography of shadows and fossilized reflections born from the act of removal.

It is no longer the institution that exhibits the artwork.
It is the artwork that exposes the institution.

• Type: Performative Installation.
• Location: Centre Pompidou Museum, Galerie 1.
• Author: Stéphane Malka, architect and scenographer
• Area: 2000m²