In the Palais de l’Élysée, the 300-year-old palace that is the official residence and office of the president of France, a conceptual work of art by the artist Benoît Pype is a recent addition to more than 5,000 arts décoratifs, 500 works of art, and 100 clocks from the collections of the Mobilier National. In one of the 365 gilded rooms once home to Madame de Pompadour, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles de Gaulle before Emmanuel Macron, Pype’s Le Sablier Millénaire (Millenium Hourglass) proposes a much longer potential history.
The hourglass is made from hand blown glass and filled with coal-tar pitch which is nearly—but not completely—solid. One drop will form and detach every decade, on average, taking 1,000 years to empty the hourglass. Pype notes that the material’s viscosity is sensitive to temperature, so global warming could accelerate its flow, perhaps transforming this object for measuring a millennium into an environmental countdown.
Le Sablier Millénaire is on loan from the Fondation Carmignac to the Palais de l’Élysée, under the aegis of the Mobilier National, for a period of 1,000 years. It is accompanied by a notebook in which each president will write a message to be revealed in the year 3,000.