Walking into the Grand Palais in Paris is always an experience marked by awe. The sheer expanse of glass and steel, the vaulted ironwork, the way sunlight spills through the dome—it’s a space that commands reverence. But when Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto filled this historic venue with his vast, immersive textile installation, something remarkable happened. The space softened. The iron became gentle, the light more intimate, and the grandness, somehow, more human. Through layers of hand-knotted fabric and delicate suspended forms, Neto didn’t just exhibit art—he invited visitors into a living, breathing environment. And it was photographer Paul Clemence who captured its spirit with a sensitivity that turned documentation into its own kind of poetry.
Textile art, long relegated to the corners of fine art discourse, has undergone a renaissance in recent years. But Ernesto Neto’s work defies even that revival, merging contemporary sculpture with ancient craft in a way that resonates with a generation increasingly drawn to tactile, sensory experiences. His installation at the Grand Palais was not simply large-scale fiber art—it was a temple of connectivity, a canopy of thread and light that made visitors slow down, take off their shoes, and look up. It drew crowds not because it was spectacular, though it certainly was, but because it was tender.
At the core of Neto’s installation was the idea of interdependence—between human bodies, architectural space, and natural rhythm. The soft, sagging forms of his crocheted structures, suspended delicately from the iron girders above, created pods and passageways where people could walk, rest, or meditate. Some visitors likened it to being inside a womb, others to wandering through an ancient forest canopy. For me, it felt like walking through memory itself—fluid, weightless, and familiar in a way that couldn’t quite be named.
Paul Clemence, known internationally for his architectural photography and his ability to translate structure into story, was perhaps the perfect eye to witness Neto’s work. His photographs didn’t just depict the installation; they captured the atmosphere—the emotional architecture of the moment. With every frame, he made visible the invisible tensions: the pull of thread under gravity, the diffused daylight sifting through fabric, the quiet curiosity in a child’s eyes as they looked up at the woven ceiling above them. His lens followed not only form but feeling, turning the ephemeral into something lasting.
In Clemence’s images, you see more than art—you see interaction. A woman reclining inside a suspended cocoon. A couple holding hands, half-lost in the folds of the structure. A boy tracing his fingers along the stitched seams as though trying to understand the pattern’s rhythm. This wasn’t installation as spectacle; it was installation as touch, as breath, as whisper. And in a world increasingly dominated by digital distraction, such tactility felt almost radical.
The Grand Palais, itself a marvel of Belle Époque engineering, presented a fascinating contrast. Where its architecture speaks in straight lines and bold symmetry, Neto’s intervention meandered in soft curves and asymmetry. The juxtaposition of tensile steel with pliant fiber created a dialogue that echoed larger conversations happening in both the art world and in architecture—how softness can inhabit space usually ruled by rigidity, how craft can intersect with monumental scale. Keywords like “immersive art installation,” “biophilic design,” and “experiential architecture” take on real meaning here. This wasn’t just about occupying space—it was about transforming it.
I visited the installation on a rainy Paris morning, one of those gray days where the air hangs heavy and your coat never quite dries. Inside the Grand Palais, the change was immediate. The scent of the rope and spices woven into the textile work mingled with the filtered light. Shoes were left at the entrance, and a hush fell over the crowd. A little girl, no older than six, asked her father if they were “inside a jellyfish,” and I smiled because it wasn’t a bad comparison. The environment pulsed gently, not with noise, but with presence.
That presence is something Paul Clemence’s photographs linger on. Unlike more traditional documentation of gallery work, which tends to focus on clean angles and isolated objects, his images prioritized relationship. How bodies occupied the space. How the textiles responded to movement. How light filtered in at different hours. There’s one photo where the late afternoon sun turns the installation golden, and the threads glow as if lit from within. Another where shadows dance on the floor in delicate embroidery. You realize quickly that this was an artwork not just seen, but inhabited.
Ernesto Neto often speaks of his work as an act of healing, of returning the body to its senses in a world that has too often asked it to disappear behind a screen. That philosophy was palpable here. Every curve, knot, and net invited pause and participation. There was no pedestal, no separation between viewer and art. And in that way, it echoed spiritual spaces—places designed for slowing down, for reflection. One woman I spoke with compared it to her experience walking through a mosque in Istanbul, where the interplay of pattern, space, and reverence shaped how people moved and breathed. Neto’s installation did something similar. It created sanctuary.
And sanctuary, as Clemence so clearly understood through his lens, is not about walls. It’s about feeling safe enough to be present. In capturing that presence, he gave the installation a kind of second life. While most of us walked through the space only once, maybe twice, Clemence’s photos allow for return. They let us feel again that moment of looking up and losing ourselves in thread and sky.
In the months following the exhibit, I found myself revisiting those images often. Not out of nostalgia, but out of need. In a world so often loud and fast, something in that quiet, floating space offered grounding. It reminded me that softness is not weakness. That art, when made with care and purpose, can hold us gently and still say something powerful. And that even in a monumental structure like the Grand Palais, it’s the threads of connection—between people, between elements, between present and memory—that make a space sacred.
Ernesto Neto and Paul Clemence, in their own ways, showed us that. Through fiber and light, lens and line, they transformed Paris’s grandest hall into something ephemeral, yet unforgettable. And walking away from it, I felt somehow more awake.