The oldest bridge in Paris has begun to vanish this week, as the artist JR \u2014 who is known as the \u201cFrench Banksy\u201d \u2014 began inflating a giant \u201ccave\u201d over the Pont Neuf.<\/p>\n
\nThe monumental, rocky illusion is swallowing the 17th-century landmark, which has carried Parisians across the Seine for more than 400 years. By Thursday, it looked as if a prehistoric cliff had risen in the heart of the city.<\/p>\n
\nThe inflation process, which was carried out overnight \u2014 after being delayed by bad weather \u2014 is the most dramatic stage yet of a project more than a year in the making.<\/p>\n
\nOne of the most ambitious public artworks Paris has seen in decades, which has been funded by the sale of JR\u2019s work and a handful of corporate partners, does not open to the public until June 6.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe\u2019re about to leave something pretty incredible in the middle of Paris,\u201d JR told The Associated Press earlier this year at his studio in the city\u2019s east, wearing his trademark hat and shades.<\/p>\n
\nThe transformation of the bridge has been documented by the AP since March with time-lapse cameras, including one fixed on a rooftop terrace high above the river, watching the bridge slowly disappear day by day.<\/p>\n
\nFrom the outside, the installation looks like a rocky mass that \u201cliterally\u201d breaks the landscape, said JR, who is famous for pasting enormous photographs on buildings, walls and rooftops around the world. This time he wanted Parisians to do something unusual on their busiest bridge: stop.<\/p>\n
\nVisitors will be able to walk for free through a long, dark tunnel that lets in no daylight and where, according to JR, people \u201cwill lose track of time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThe numbers are startling. The structure is 120 meters (393 feet) long and 18 meters (59 feet) tall \u2014 which is as high as a six-story building.<\/p>\n
\nYet it is built almost entirely from air \u2014 80 fabric arches filled with 20,000 cubic meters of it \u2014 and weighs only about five tons. The fabric was hand stitched by 25 artisans in a village in Brittany.<\/p>\n
\nNothing digs into the historic stone.<\/p>\n
\nCut the air and the cliff would sink like a held breath \u2014 a collapse JR\u2019s engineers spent weeks rehearsing in a hangar at Orly airport to be sure that if the power ever failed, the rock would come down gently.<\/p>\n
\nThe artwork, called La Caverne du Pont Neuf, is a tribute to a Parisian artistic legend.<\/p>\n
\nIn 1985, artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, wrapped the same bridge in pale golden fabric \u2014 13 kilometers of rope, a decade of arguing with city hall, three million visitors in two weeks. The act helped invent the idea of monumental art in modern cities.<\/p>\n
\nA square beside the bridge now carries their names.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s pretty hard to go after them,\u201d JR said.<\/p>\n
\nHis idea, he said, is to bring \u201cmineral and nature\u201d back to the heart of the city. He is not covering the bridge but undressing it \u2014 sending the dressed stone back to the limestone quarries from which Paris itself was cut.<\/p>\n
\nThe cave is also a warning. JR built it as a nod to Plato\u2019s allegory, in which prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for the real world.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWhat are our caves today? Our phones,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause we believe that our algorithm on social media is the reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThen he walks straight into the contradiction: to enter his cave about screens, visitors raise their phones.<\/p>\n
\nThe tech company Snap has built an augmented-reality layer that shows what the eye cannot.
\nThe sound is a low, mineral hum from Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk \u2014 who was 10 the year Christo wrapped the bridge.<\/p>\n
\nThe cave will be open around the clock from June 6-28, closing the bridge to traffic and visible from the quays, from passing boats, even from the top of the Eiffel Tower.<\/p>\n
\nIt will coincide with Paris Fashion Week, World Music Day and the all-night Nuit Blanche arts festival.<\/p>\n
\nWhen it comes down, the fabric will be reused or recycled. Air, JR likes to say, leaves no scar.
\nThen, like the golden wrapping 40 years before, the cave will be gone \u2014 and the Pont Neuf, older than the republic and older than the revolution, will reappear exactly as it was.<\/p>\n