The Paris Olympics don’t kick off until July 26, but the iconic Olympic Torch is already in town. The Flame arrived in Paris on Bastille Day (July 14), borne by 2016 gold medalist Col. Thibaut Vallette, and was integrated into France’s National Day celebrations. The torch, carried by a motley assortment of bearers that included World Cup winner Thierry Henry, K-Pop icon Jin and garbage collector and environmentalist Ludovic Franceschet, made its way through iconic locations in Paris, including some of the city’s most important cultural spots, including the Louvre. Notably, the torchbearer who carried the Flame into the museum was the French artist JR, known for his large-scale public installations that engage communities with some of the most pressing social issues through a powerful blend of photography, street art and social activism.
We reached out to the artist to ask what he was feeling in that special moment. “I have a lot of memories with the Louvre, a lot of special ones,” JR told Observer. “I had the chance to exhibit there twice… This is also where I learned of the death of Agnes Varda in 2019 while I was pasting the giant collage on the square. We had filmed part of our film inside the Louvre with Agnes. Going back there and carrying this torch, taking it from the pyramid to the inside, was a very special memory for me, with a lot of emotion behind it.”
The artist’s relationship with the Louvre runs deep, stemming from his memorable, monumental intervention of 2016, in which he covered the Pritzker Prize-winning architect I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid with a gigantic black-and-white photographic collage that made it appear to disappear. Then, in 2019, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Louvre Pyramid, JR created another massive optical illusion, The Secret of the Great Pyramid, making the same pyramid emerge from inside a deep crater apparently excavated in the surrounding ground. True to JR’s style, the artwork was created with the help of collective action by thousands of local volunteers and was ephemeral and temporary: visitors were invited to walk over the collage, gradually destroying it, symbolizing the impermanence of art. By the end of the weekend, the piece was almost entirely worn away and then removed, leaving just great pictures as its memory.
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JR is also no stranger to working with the Olympic Games, having installed another of his large-scale projects for the 2016 Olympics in Rio De Janeiro. There, with The Chronicles of Rio, the French artist embarked on one of his most ambitious projects of community recording and awareness, collecting a series of portraits of Rio’s inhabitants to shed light on the everyday lives and stories of people from various neighborhoods, particularly those from underrepresented areas. These portraits were then transformed into enormous posters and displayed in locations around the city.
The tradition of the Olympic Torch is rooted in customs established in Ancient Greece: at the ancient Olympic Games, a sacred flame burned at the altar of Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, in Olympia, as a symbol of purity, the endeavor for perfection and the struggle for victory. The tradition was restored in modern times at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, with the Flame lit in Olympia and carried to Berlin through a relay of runners, symbolizing the link between the ancient and modern Games. Since then, torchbearers have carried the Flame at every Olympic Games on a journey from Greece to the host city, with thousands of participants from diverse backgrounds traversing countries and continents in an action symbolizing peace and unity.
