Expo 2015: Temps impartis et être mot

My world of imagination with sand was born long ago, when I was only six or seven, and witnessed the unexpected flow of a pocket of sand* from the
ceiling of a limestone cave where it had been trapped in stone for millions of years. That experience quite likely bonded and sealed my quasi-mystical
attachment to that mysterious matter. In 1989, I met physicists Bernard Dulieu, Étienne Guyon, Pierre-Gilles De Gennes and Serge Koutsmy, specialists in
fluid mechanics and the random motion of granular materials, and collaborated with them on “science and art.” That incredibly rich collaboration had a
determining influence on my artistic research; it allowed me to incorporate sand into my work as the definitive “matter for the poetry of Allotted Time.”
JB Métais, December 2014

In the context of an art gallery or museum, the visitor is invited to physically feel “reversible time,” to handle it, provoking the transfer of a volume of sand from one receptacle to another.
This releases a sound, which gradually dims in relation to the amount of sand that flows. Plunging into the auditory dimension, the actor-spectator has to move in order to visually observe the cone in formation. Laden with memory, he is also perfectly capable of freeing himself from that fatality that binds us to the inexorable, in one obscure yet joyous leap, where borders disappear and  spaces surpass limits...
Pierre Giquel