“Jolie Folie” - UCCA Pavilion

UCCA CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

SHANGHAI, CHINA (2024) 

Ultra-thin, Self-supported, Aluminum Place Making Structure

Commissioned by UCCA Center For Contemporary Art.
Design + Computation by MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY.

All images are Copyrights by THEVERYMANY and UCCA (No use or reproduction are allowed without written authorization).

A shimmering sphere has landed in the sculpture garden of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Shanghai. Rising eight meters high, Jolie Folie is both monumental and porous, a globe of intricate aluminum lacework assembled from thousands of 3 mm-thick parts. Riveted together, these slender pieces form a flowing skin that swells and dips, opening passages for visitors to move in, out, and through.

Commissioned for the 2024 Shanghai Jing’an International Sculpture Project, the work is an invitation to wander—its name translating loosely to “beautiful madness,” a nod to its exuberant form and playful spirit. From a distance, the sphere reads as a singular, almost celestial volume. Up close, it reveals itself as a patchwork of meandering seams, each junction a clue to its assembly and a path for the eyes and fingertips to follow.

Children dart in and out of the openings, weaving between curved ribs. Adults linger in the shade, tracing the riveted patterns, their gaze pulled along the sculpture’s undulating edges. The structure encourages this slow discovery: moving around it, one’s view shifts between framed glimpses of the garden and immersive moments within.

The form is neither solid nor hollow, but a permeable architecture—light filters through its lattice, casting ever-changing patterns on the ground. Like a cloud caught mid-swirl or a giant seedpod cracked open, Jolie Folie resists being fixed in a single perspective. It asks instead to be experienced as a journey: an exterior to circle, an interior to inhabit, a landscape of edges to explore.

In its merging of precision engineering and whimsical geometry, Jolie Folie transforms a sphere into a living, breathing space—one that sparks curiosity, rewards attention, and celebrates the joy of getting wonderfully lost.

All images are copyrighted by THEVERYMANY and UCCA (No use or reproduction are allowed without written authorization).