Pascale Weber's 'Le corps à l'épreuve de l'installation-projection' Explores Immersive Art

Pascale Weber's book 'Le corps à l'épreuve de l'installation-projection' examines the hybrid genre of installation-projection, which merges historical fantasmagoria and magic lantern shows with visual arts. Weber distinguishes this form from video or multimedia installations by emphasizing its relational spatial arrangement of objects and images, where the visitor's body is immersed and engaged. The book traces a path from black-box scenography associated with photography and concave figures to light projections that engulf bodies and new technologies. It positions installation-projection as a memory journey through art history, between reminiscence and anticipation, transforming the past and acting as a laboratory for the future, fostering transversal connections between visual and performing arts. The work presents a major art form that affects the 'sensator'—not as spectacle or visit but as experience, sometimes risking the viewer becoming a guinea pig. This closed space of sensory experimentation maintains an ambivalent relationship with institutional museum spaces. Following land art, the work no longer occupies a place but constitutes it as a space to be inhabited by the sensator's body. The book is authored by Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarié.