14 DAY TRIAL // French artist Abraham Poincheval is staging an extreme performance in Paris: he is living inside the preserved carcass of a grizzly bear for thirteen days. This means the 42-year-old artist is staying inside a space of half a square meter (5.4 square feet) for almost two weeks.
Poincheval first performed Dans La Peau de l'Ours (Inside the Skin of the Bear) at the CAIRN Centre for Contemporary Art in Digne, last year, and is now repeating the experiment in a Paris museum.
According to Oddity Central, the artist is no stranger to extreme situations, as he specializes in confining himself to unusually small spaces for long periods of time. Previously, he spent seven days buried in a specially dug hole beneath a bookstore in Marseilles, in October 2012.
And in 2008 he traveled underground through a closed tunnel together with artist Laurent Tixador. They spent 20 days digging holes and then sealing them up as part of a project titled “Horizon Moins 20.”
The current art performance piece is exhibited at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Hunting and Wildlife Museum) of Paris. It began on April 1 and will continue until April 13.
During the unusual performance, Poincheval will not leave the carved carcass of the taxidermied bear, which means he will eat, drink, sleep and relieve himself within the hollowed-out animal, while being continuously filmed by two cameras.
The artist said he was inspired to create this project by animal carcasses he encountered while performing a different piece in the French Alps. Apparently, he wants to experience the unusual situation due to a “need to become one with such an animal.” So, he is enduring extreme physical discomfort just for the sake of art, and anyone can see how the experiment is going through his livestream.
“For him this act signifies a rebirth, a rite of passage, to pass from the world of the dead to that of the living,” reads a statement about his installation.
The grizzly bear was excavated by Abraham himself and reconstructed with plywood, plaster, foam and polystyrene tubes. The carcass was covered with the bear’s original skin and fur and it includes some storage places where water, food, books and other items are placed.
The director of the French museum, Claude D’Anphenaise, is very enthusiastic about the project.
“It is very interesting and our visitors are very excited. […] He has to live in total isolation and be totally self-sufficient in a space not dissimilar from what an astronaut would experience in a rocket. It will be very difficult for him,” he said.