The 602nd Night

Cave paintings, medieval tapestries, trompe l’oeil drawings: representing faraway places and fantastical stories on walls is an ancient tradition. Yet these techniques have all but disappeared, as has the culture of decorative storytelling. Locked up at home, Claire Saunier revived this custom of enlarging space with figurative surfaces. She found inspiration in ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, where the 602nd night is the strangest of all. That’s when Scheherazade starts telling the Sultan his story and the origin of the book itself, inside which they are characters. All the little stories already woven inside one another become interwoven forever and a day, or forever and a night. And so, the surfaces do not close, but open like windows to wonderful worlds.