Juliette Bessette

Juliette Bessette has a PhD in art history and is a visiting researcher at the German Center for Art History – DFK Paris. Since the 1960s, she has been working on the notion of the environment as seen through technology and in relation to the arts, from an ecological perspective. She teaches contemporary art at the École du Louvre.

This project brings together two creative initiatives in the form of environments on the edge between art, architecture and design: architect Richard Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic structures and artist Carla Accardi’s Tenda structures, which share characteristics of transparency, lightness and mobility. The first international event to give resonance to the geodesic dome, a structure developed by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1940s, took place in Italy, at the 1954 Milan Triennale, whose theme was “Life between artifact and nature: design and the environmental challenge”. In 1967, the geodesic dome was again featured at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoletto. At the same time, with Tenda (1965-1966), Carla Accardi initiated work on temporary structures as part of a reflection on environmental art, the first of its kind in Italy. She created several such environments in Sicofoil (a plastic derivative) or Perspex. The properties of these materials are to be found in the history of sensibilities: Carla Accardi has said of these transparent structures that they exerted “a certain fascination” on her, representing “a symbolically different way of life.”