Laure Prouvost - Nous, frissons d’étoiles, Grand Palais

We Felt A Star Dying asked the scenography to do something unusual for the Grand Palais' nave: hold a single, continuous sensory environment beneath one of Europe's largest glass roofs, rather than a sequence of discrete rooms. Laure Prouvost's two years of research into quantum physics, conducted with philosopher Tobias Rees and scientist Hartmut Neven, produced a body of work built from probability and entanglement rather than fixed form, and the space needed to behave the same way: porous, atmospheric, and structured more by sensation than by walls.

The scenography channels visitors through a tunnel at the entrance before releasing them into the full volume of the nave, where the light shifts from enclosed and directional to the vast, diffuse daylight of the glass roof above. That threshold does the work an exhibition wall would normally do elsewhere: it marks a change of state rather than a change of room. Inside, the kinetic sculpture The Beginning (six limbs animated by sound and light, cosmic and mechanical at once) sits at the centre of the nave with the video We Felt A Star Dying running at its core, while the Cute Bits, meteorite-like forms nodding to quantum bits, hang from the glass roof itself, some fitted as helmets carrying voice and scent. The design treats the Grand Palais' architecture as a found cosmological instrument: the nave's height becomes vertical distance for suspended objects to hang across, its glass roof becomes ambient light rather than a ceiling to work around.

Materially, the design leans on the same vocabulary as the artworks it holds: spatialised sound, low filaments that brush against visitors as they pass, platforms and sandbank-like ground surfaces that soften the nave's hard architecture, and an enveloping cushion built for lying down and watching rather than standing and viewing. Lighting swings between the dazzling and the near-dark, keeping visitors' bodies, not just their eyes, inside the piece. None of this is staged as spectacle for its own sake; each element is a physical translation of an idea from the work (entanglement, scale, the indeterminacy of matter) into something a body can actually stand inside.

This continues an ongoing collaboration with Prouvost across the three venues that have hosted We Felt A Star Dying (Kraftwerk Berlin, OGR Torino, and now Grand Palais Paris), and reflects a broader approach to scenography as "emotional landscape": architecture as the thing that lets an audience feel a concept, quantum entanglement included, rather than just look at its depiction.

2026 Grand Palais, FR
Design: Diogo Passarinho Studio
Team: Diogo Passarinho and Gonçalo Reynolds
Artists: Laure Prouvost

Curator: Barbara Kroher - Head of Exhibition Programming at the GrandPalais

Adjunct Curator : Carly Whitefield - Head of Programme at LAS Art Fundation

Photography: © Grégoire Edouard for GrandPalaisRmn,2026

Production and install: MWB

This exhibition is adapted from WE FELT A STAR DYING, originally commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, and co-commissioned by OGR Torino in 2025

28 June — 28 July 2026