As an explorer and collector, Mercier assembles his installations using a mix of his own sculptures and found objects gathered during his travels. The resulting compositions function like “choreographies of the eye,” encouraging viewers to navigate landscapes where discarded relics and carefully crafted forms generate unexpected narratives. His work is as tactile as it is conceptual, rejecting traditional barriers like glass or fencing in favour of open, immersive experiences. His sculptures—often weathered, precarious, or absurdly juxtaposed—invite audiences to rethink their relationships with objects, be they an overturned car lodged in a garden (Bad Timing, Villa Medici, 2023) or sand sculptures of rumpled mattresses and pillows at the Conciergerie in Paris (Outremonde III – The Sleeping Chapter, 2022). Across these works, Mercier challenges ideas of permanence and decay, creating ephemeral landscapes that are as haunting as they are humorous.

His fascination with transformation extends into his stage work, where he pushes the boundaries of live performance. His Outremonde series, launched in 2021, is a particularly striking example of his hybrid approach: a trilogy of live exhibitions that dissolve the divisions between museum spaces and performance halls. By animating sculptures with movement and guiding audiences through dreamlike sequences, Mercier crafts juxtaposed experiences that exist between stillness and action, solid and fluid, past and future.

A defining example of his approach is Skinless, presented at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, where 100 tons of non-organic waste were used as both an installation and a stage. Here, waste—usually discarded and ignored—became a living, evolving medium, symbolizing cycles of destruction and renewal, Exhibiting the kind of radical reframing that defines Mercier’s artistic philosophy, namely his ability to make the overlooked feel urgent, or the inert feel aliv

Sustainability plays a significant role in your practice, evident from the sand-sculpted scenography of the “Outremonde” series through to the compressed waste in “Skinless”, which is sourced locally in each city where it is staged. How do you approach the environmental and conceptual dimensions of materiality in your work?

We live in a time where it is more urgent than ever before for artists to imagine new ways of creating and sharing their work.

I don’t view myself as a minimalist artist—I travel extensively, and my work involves moving significant amounts of material. I therefore have to think very hard about the best way to move these large amounts. Every one of my projects is a reflection on how to produce differently. The process of making and the context in which a work exists are just as important as its form. Together with Céline Peychet, who runs the studio, we strive to ensure that each project is both a formal invention and a reinvention of how it is produced.

You often work site-specifically, responding to the architectural and historical contexts such as the Villa Medici or the Conciergerie. How do these environments shape your creative process, and do you view your works as temporary interventions or long-term dialogues with these spaces?

When I have the privilege of being invited to work in a historic site, it feels as though my artistic gesture shifts in scale, suddenly gaining the potential to become vast. My approach of layering and creating friction between different times moves beyond the scale of the object and extends to that of architecture itself. In such contexts, my work often engages within a dynamic of tension, conflict, or contrast, often disrupting how we perceive historic architecture. As I mentioned earlier, what interests me is sculpting space, architecture, perspective, and the way we look at things. These spatial and temporal relationships always tell us something—whether it’s about how we come into conflict with a system or how we are inevitably drawn back into a memory of the past.

At MUCEM, you were invited to intervene in the creation of the permanent “Mediterraneans” exhibition. What was your approach to reinterpreting historical artifacts, and how do you perceive your role in terms of reshaping the narratives constructed by museums?

It’s not an easy role, and I wouldn’t really say that I have been truly successful in it. For the exhibition at Mucem, I was invited more as a poet-curator. The exhibition brought together the work of eight academic curators alongside mine, all exploring the construction of Mediterranean identity. We may have worked with the same objects, the same themes, but not with the same tools or responsibilities. It was an incredibly enriching experience to see how my work could complement an educational narrative on historical and political questions.