Street Artist JR Inflates Giant Cave Over Paris Oldest Bridge

Street artist JR and his team began inflating an immersive cave on the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris in the early hours of Thursday morning. The oldest bridge in Paris looked Thursday as if it had been swallowed by a mountain. The transformation is the work of JR, the street artist known as the “French Banksy,” who this week began inflating a giant artificial “cave” over the Pont Neuf, turning the 17th-century bridge that has carried Parisians across the Seine for more than 400 years into a rocky illusion rising over the river.

JR has said the idea of La Caverne du Pont Neuf is to bring “mineral and nature” back to the heart of the city. He says he is not covering the bridge so much as revealing the stone taken from limestone quarries from which Paris itself was cut. The structure is 120 meters long and 18 meters tall.

It is built almost entirely from air — 80 fabric arches filled with 20,000 cubic meters of it — and weighs only about five tons. The inflation, carried out overnight after being delayed by bad weather, is the most dramatic stage yet of a project more than a year in the making.

One of the most ambitious public artworks Paris has seen in decades, it does not open to the public until June 6. The cave will be open around the clock from June 6-28, closing the bridge to traffic. Visitors will be able to walk for free through a long, dark tunnel that lets in no daylight.

” The artwork is a tribute to a Parisian artistic legend. In 1985, artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, wrapped the same bridge in pale golden fabric.

Context and Themes The cave is also a warning.

JR built it as a nod to Plato’s allegory, in which prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for the real world. “What are our caves today? Our phones,” he said. ” The tech company Snap has built an augmented-reality layer that shows what the eye cannot. The sound is a low, mineral hum from Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk.

When it comes down, the fabric will be reused or recycled. Then, like the golden wrapping over 40 years before, the cave will be gone — and the Pont Neuf, older than the republic and older than the revolution, will reappear exactly as it was.