Le Cyclop, Jean Tinguely’s masterpiece, reawakens for the 2025 season, a year that marks the one hundredth anniversary of its creator’s birth.
The artistic programme elaborated by François Taillade, Director of Association Le Cyclop, intertwines the history of Le Cyclop’s construction with contemporary creations by guest artists.
These poetic and political works, some created by artists in residence at Le Cyclop, merge sculpture and performance. From these creations come fluids, smoke, gestures, and even a socially conscious discourse about our world and the environment, as well as the sound of birdsong,
giving voice to those who offer a form of re-enchantment.
Metal, wood, blown glass, the movement of machines and bodies, songs and cries… All come together to announce this very special anniversary:
Æterna Flux..
From the pathway leading to Le Cyclop, the sounds of blood-curdling “Aztec death whistles” set the tone for this anniversary exhibition.
Jaguar*, a graduate of the École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence (ESAAIX), conceived of this introductory passageas a move into confusion, where we can transform reality and invent new temporalities. Scheduled to perform, the artist will invite the audience to travel with her to other worlds, other dimensions. Jaguar likes to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, allowing “atmospheric stories of molecular rabbits and cave dogs [to emerge], encounters to be fabricated, all rendered possible through magic.”
Swiss artist Bernhard Luginbühl (1929-2011) was one of Jean Tinguely’s closest friends and made a significant contribution to the creation and construction of Le Cyclop. His piece, titled Spaghettifigur mit 86 Schrauben in Boss (2002), will be presented from August onwards.
It forms the cornerstone of this anniversary exhibition and serves as an additional link between the heritage dimension of Le Cyclop site and its activity as an art centre. This work pays tribute to the friendship between these two creators behind the construction of a collaborative masterpiece, which today allows new artists to express themselves.
Antoine Nessi* composed the work titled Nourrice as a long sculptural body in metal, half-organic, half-industrial, with strong political overtones. The structure distils a whitish liquid similar to milk.
Perhaps it is an allegory of a new social body caught in the grip of an agri-food machine that sucks, swallows, and rejects the bodies necessary for its functioning—animal and human alike—both those who produce and those who consume, all caught in the same vice.
This work was created with the support of the Casa de Velázquez.
While wandering the woods of Milly-la-Forêt, Haena Yoo* fell upon several pieces of wood, trunks, and stumps, which she then hollowed out to create moulds.
In collaboration with the Verrerie d’art de Soisy-sur-École (glassworks), she then created sculptures incorporating blown glass pieces. The resulting installation combines wood charred by the fusion of glass—the mould thus becomes a work of art—and blown glass. A secret mixture of medicinal herbs concocted by the artist is placed to burn in these blown glass pieces, with tantalizing plumes of smoke rising when visitors approach them.
Denis Savary has been invited to reenact a performance created at Le Cyclop in 2013, called Étourneaux.
This piece is closely linked to the spread of Ursonate, a four-movement, guttural, syncopated sound poem by Kurt Schwitters. Jean Tinguely himself paid tribute
to the extraordinary work of Kurt Schwitters in Le Cyclop. With the help of Les Chanteurs d’Oiseaux, Johnny Rasse and Jean Boucault, Denis Savary appropriates the rhythm of Ursonate to reproduce it through the whistling of starlings.
This work is now part of the collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap).
Swiss performer Pamina de Coulon* writes texts which she herself says “are not meant to be spoken but to be read.”
Her performance work is militant, feminist, and ecological; making use of her body, voice, flow, and thoughts, which drift in a kind of transdisciplinarity, around the complexity of the world, the universe, and the hierarchy of knowledge, in an attempt to better overturn this hierarchy. She will present an excerpt of work in a new performance, titled Fire of Emotions: Maledizione.
To mark the centenary of Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), the town of Milly-la-Forêt, in partnership with Association Le Cyclop, is exhibiting a series of photographs by Laurent Condominas from June 21 to September 28, paying tribute to the artist, designer, and conductor of the monumental sculpture Le Cyclop.
The perspective of Laurent Condominas, a close friend of the de Saint Phalle & Tinguely family, allows us to enter the titanic construction of this collaborative work. Nearly fifty photographs, drawn from a substantial collection of archives, capture moments in the work's life, its transformations, and the important artists who joined the project: Niki de Saint Phalle, Bernhard Luginbühl, Daniel Spoerri, and more.
2025 season from April 5 to November 2
At Le Cyclop:
May 17: Jaguars' performance
June 21: Denis Savary's performance feat. Les Chanteurs d'oiseaux
July 5 to November 2: all opening days, film projection Le monstre de Tinguely (RTS Radio Télévision Suisse,Viva show dated 02.05.1989, 54 min.)
September 27: Pamina de Coulon's performance
At the Espace culturel Paul Bédu in Milly-la-Forêt:
June 21 to September 28: Exhibition of photographs of Laurent Condominas, Le Cyclop in Milly-la-Forêt, Soisy-sur-École, Un Rêve plus long que la nuit, 1971-1992 and cultural itinerary in Milly-la-Forêt.
* artists in residence in 2024 and 2025 at Le Cyclop.
Photographs: Salim Santa Lucia, Zia Bazin