At the Walls & Wonders, A Wallpaper Exhibition at the Fair exhibition, a tropical forest (11 m x 6 m) and waterfalls (8 m x 6 m) painted with ink on Japanese paper adorn the chateau’s galleries.

24H Circadian Antipode, an ink on paper panorama was created for the dining room of the Château de Champlitte. It is a composition of discoveries by scientists and other voyagers that forms landscape shades on 44 sheets of Thai paper measuring 24 meters in length and 3 meters in height. The panorama was created by the skillful hands of Caroline Desnoëttes and the ears of her bio-acoustician accomplices, Olivier Adam and Thierry Aubin.

The panorama invites the eyes and ears of the spectator to experience an internal journey with a revitalizing change of scenery. This immersive drawing inspired by the 18th-century panoramic wallpaper, The Savages of the Pacific Ocean, is a continuation of the mural fable combining scientific discoveries with exotic illusions.

The artwork is detached from the wall to reveal both sides of the panorama, suspended in space with the paper playing on colorful transparencies that pique the spectator’s curiosity. The 24-hour journey on 24 linear meters of drawing provides an ovoid circle with a 360° view. This panel-cut panorama draws on the graphic language of clouds for assembling motifs of playfulness, tearing, swelling, mutation, polymorphism and the mouth of hell. It spreads out from dark indigos to luminous flashes of the warm hours and vespertine crimsons. The passenger of the drawing is immersed in wet colors and shapes in fusion, horizon-less, disturbed by an inconsistent and scattered perspective increasing the expansion of the space, while treading on survival blankets. A vocabulary of shapes borrowed from the palm tree, banana tree, tamarind tree, weeping birch, mimosa and other tropical plants, evokes the antipode – a remote, coveted place. A geographic illusion where nights contrast our days and consistently intertwine with dawn and dusk, creating one endless entity.

Evoking the solar cycle plunges the wanderer of the drawing into circadian territory – a chronological and biological 24-hour rhythm: the internal clock within all living organisms that connects us to the world.

To enter the 24H Circadian Antipode is to seek an encounter with hybrid creatures – “homobestiaplanta” – with feathers, furs, grains, flowers, shells, corals… which reveal our own hybridization. They take on shades of color through the imbibition of ink like a dye irrigating the kozo fibers of Thai paper. This unique encounter, resembling a cabinet of curiosities, tells of the likely and the impossible, the disturbance and the intensity, the obvious and the senseless. It evokes insatiable metamorphoses that are imperceptible and profoundly surprising throughout the history of the Earth.

The soundtrack for 24H Circadian Antipode entitled Cantus Oceanumsilva is a true sound panorama, a mixture of recordings of cetacean and tropical forest songs created by bio-acousticians Olivier Adam and Thierry Aubin. It offers the alternative experience of feeling a simultaneous connection with underwater and Amazonian life.

24H Circadian Antipode pays homage to life in perpetual evolution and invites us to roam along 72 m² of ink and paper, on the banks of the great atlas of biodiversity, from the earth’s seas to tropical forests. Treading on the survival blankets reminds us of the urgency in preserving the treasures we depend on. The artwork raises the question as to who are the savages of the 21st century.

• Julie Chevaillier : manager of the Haute-Saône department museums.
• The entire museum staff
• Fabrice Gaboriau for his photographs at the workshop
• Olivier Adam : a bio-acoustics specialist who has studied various cetacean species since 2001. He recently described the different roles of the respiratory system of mysticetes to explain their sound production. He is currently working on the interactions between mother humpback whales and their calves. With some 40 articles written for science magazines, he organized an international conference on acoustics and cetaceans in June 2018 (http://sabiod.univ-tln.fr/DCLDE)
• Thierry Aubin : director of Research at the CNRS and team head of the UMR 9197 neuroscience institute at Paris-Saclay University. After studying neurobiology and ethology, he specialized in animal acoustic communication, particularly crocodiles, penguins, songbirds and sea lions. He has published over one hundred scientific articles and has carried out numerous missions in the Arctic, Antarctic and the Amazon rainforest.
• Ronan de la Croix for the composition of « Cantus oceanumsilva »