the wondergates
The Wondergates project is composed of two linked parts:
the Archangels and their Gates.
Before imagining the Wondergates—these kaleidoscopic caissons with quasi-religious authority, conceived as thresholds leading to another world—I first imagined a new figure of Archangel.
This is a contemporary rereading of the iconography of Saint Michael slaying the dragon. This bronze sculpture can exist as an autonomous piece, but it is also fully integrated into the cosmogony of Monde n°2. It appears crowning certain domes or occupying alcoves in some of the architectures of this fictional world.
The Wondergates take the form of two doors, each guarded by an Archangel.
Each figure has a daisy head and wears a cosmonaut suit. It combines bronze, aluminum wings, and plexiglass elements. The Archangel is installed within a fluted niche in mirror-polished steel, surrounded by flowers made of brass and resin. The whole shimmers with the colors of dawn.
On the façade, flowers with long brass stems rise skyward with the same rectitude as the organ pipes of Notre-Dame de Paris. A zenithal light bathes the ensemble, evoking the divine rays of Bernini engulfing Saint Teresa in her ecstasy.
This new variety of Archangel, unlike Saint Michael, does not slay the demon. Instead, it plants a stake into a planet and transforms it into a lollipop, diverting traditional heroic narratives toward a new mythology.
A hybrid figure—at once divine, vegetal, and cosmic—this Archangel can appear as a demi-god in the service of a vengeful ecology. By crossing ecological and natural references with those of a religious and mythical figure, the project questions the possible convergence between ecology and eschatology, between fear of the end times and narratives of salvation.
Has ecology not, for part of the 21st-century Western world, become a form
of implicit religion? Without answering affirmatively, Wondergates poses this
open question: like certain religions, does ecology not sometimes function as a narrative announcing the end of the world, structuring beliefs, fears, and collective behaviors?
An unusual fusion between the Stargate portal of Stargate SG-1 and a cult altar, the Wondergates are my first works conceived and realized at an architectural scale.
