Théo Mercier

We’ve dug up Mona’s old library, figuratively speaking, and had the hole filled by Théo Mercier—a French artist and stage director with a captivating process and a crack team of sand sculptors. His immense installation is constructed, on site, from sand sourced from a local quarry.

Théo presents us with a catastrophic landscape—a great sandpit awash with debris and cold light, suggesting the aftermath of disaster. A hurricane, a tsunami, or a landslide perhaps; appearing frozen in time like a photograph, or what the artist describes as ‘a fossilisation’. Or is this surreal diorama a vision of what’s to come? David Walsh once said the rising ocean would swallow his museum in the not-too-distant future.

Théo’s new work at Mona takes inspiration from the notion of dark tourism: our propensity to seek out and travel to, even exploit, places closely associated with suffering and death. Tourists have long made visits to sites charged with history’s grim residue, from Pompeii to Auschwitz, the catacombs of Paris to the Cambodian killing fields, and Hiroshima to Ground Zero. Not to mention our very own Port Arthur, another top Tassie tourist destination.

What do we hope to see and feel when we visit these places marked out by death and disaster? What’s to be found when we excavate our motives? Empathy, schadenfreude, mere tawdry curiosity? The artist doesn’t claim to know the answers, and neither do we. He says this artwork questions how humans cope with catastrophe. Not the fact of calamity itself—inevitable in degrees as we shuffle round this mortal coil—but how we reckon with what remains.

Artistic direction by Théo Mercier
Curated by Jarrod Rawlins, Olivier Varenne and Sarah Wallace
Sand sculptors: Kevin Crawford, Enguerrand David, Eva McGrew and Leonardo Ugolini
Project manager and artistic advisor: Céline Peychet
Sand work manager and compactor: Kevin Crawford
3D design assistant: Marius Belmeguenai

Header image: Gut City Punch (detail), 2023, Théo Mercier