Le Bord De La Terre: An Exhibit About the Vertigo of a Mountain Slipping Away
- Pierre-Gaël Pasquiou
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
At Poush, just a few yards from the humming asphalt of Aubervilliers, there’s a mountain that doesn’t exist—except it does, in the way art can make something feel physical. It’s an imagined, poetic peak where contemporary artists take aim at our myths of the vertical: what we project onto height, what we go looking for up there, and what we pretend not to see until the ground starts shifting.
Le bord de la terre was presented as a six-chapter journey—part expedition, part storybook—built to be walked like you’d read an adventure novel. Photographers, sculptors, and performance artists played the role of guides, leading visitors toward that precise point where the “ground” seems to fall away and vertigo takes over.
Art—like alpinism—is often a story about limits: physical ones, geographic ones, but most of all poetic ones. Like a climber searching higher up for some kind of absolute, the eleven artists gathered at Poush pushed at the edges of what we think “mountain” even means. Far from the tired cliché of a summit to conquer, Le bord de la terre invited visitors to read the mountain differently. Each work acted like a handhold—something you grab as you move through a shared narrative, step by step, from romantic dream to the tangible reality of a landscape in flux.
A trip to the mountain’s far edge
“I go to the mountains because up there is where the edge of the earth happened,” wrote Italian author Erri De Luca. That end-of-the-world feeling was the pulse Le bord de la terre set out to capture.
Shown at Poush (Aubervilliers) from May 22 through July 19, 2025, the exhibition took over the entire Le Rift building. The scenography turned the space into a vertical, maze-like terrain—less a neutral gallery than an exploration zone, built for wandering, doubling back, and climbing your way through ideas.
From the entrance, the premise was clear: you were meant to “walk the mountain” the way you’d turn the pages of a narrative. Six chapters structured the route, like a series of living tableaux that approached the mountain from different angles—“from romantic landscape to object of study.”
You moved from a dreamlike vision inspired by the great Romantic painters to an encounter with the Pic du Midi in a speculative film: young people watched from a preserved landscape, taking in both our thin horizons and our own finitude. Sometimes the point landed with brutal simplicity—an ice cube suspended over a body of water, enough to suggest the permanence of a world that’s disappearing.
The show also gestured toward a real, unsettling image: Swiss glaciers wrapped in vast tarps to protect them from melting—photographs that can read like shrouds, as if, failing to preserve the ice, we’re at least trying to carry it off under a sheet. Le bord de la terre didn’t sidestep what’s pressing on our societies right now. It put visitors in front of outcomes that already feel decided, already irreversible, forcing you—through art and poetry—to face the strange absurdity of watching mountains rise while our future flattens.
In other words: climate change was there, in the room, in the work, in the pacing of the walk. And some of the high-up performances on display could seem less “wild” than the tragic story quietly sitting behind the pieces themselves.
Artists tied into a rope team, looking at the mountain together
To bring this collective story to life, curators Simon Jung, Jeanne de La Masselière, and Inès Massonie brought together eleven artists whose works spoke back and forth across the mountain world. It was a kind of rope team—climbers would call it a cordée, a group literally tied together—except here the link was the conversation between images, materials, bodies, and ideas.
Téo Becher, Simon Boudvin, Julia Borderie & Éloïse Le Gallo, Claude Cattelain, Caroline Corbasson, Max Coulon, Antonin Detemple, Matthieu Gafsou, Julia Gault, and Noémie Goudal formed a panoramic, richly varied set of viewpoints. Each artist brought a distinct way of seeing the mountain: changing landscapes, verticality, geology in motion, borders, perception, the body under strain.
Among the standout works, Noémie Goudal’s Soulèvements series reimagined geology through striking visual illusions. Simon Boudvin’s ladders became symbols of crossing natural boundaries. Claude Cattelain leaned into the poetry of the “useless” gesture through physical performances. Matthieu Gafsou exposed the contradictions baked into our tourist habits, while Julia Gault staged the precariousness of any kind of vertical stance. The duo Julia Borderie & Éloïse Le Gallo, meanwhile, treated the mountain as lived space—threaded through stories, crossings, and human experience.
Late night, last calls
Even if this artistic expedition ended on July 19, it didn’t go quietly.
On Wednesday, July 16, Poush hosted a special late-night opening to celebrate the “mountain” deep into the evening. Starting at 5 p.m., the curators led a free guided tour—an inside look at how the project came together and what was happening behind the scenes. After that, the night stretched into a music set, turning Le Rift into a kind of basecamp dance floor, with sounds meant to echo the peaks.
For anyone who missed the nocturne, there were two final chances to catch the show during regular opening hours: Friday, July 18 and Saturday, July 19 (closing day), from 3 to 7 p.m. Admission was free.
Le bord de la terre was shown at Poush, 153 avenue Jean-Jaurès, Aubervilliers (Métro Quatre-Chemins). Free admission throughout the run.
