StoryChristo and Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2020 and 2009 respectively, had hoped to see their Mastaba, a gigantic structure made up of oil barrels, erected in the desert of Abu Dhabi. While their posthumous packaging of the Arc de Triomphe will be unveiled on September 18, negotiations continue, crossing politics, economy and art.
Since July 15, Vladimir Yavachev, 48, has been very busy. Every day, this jovial bearded man with broad shoulders oversees the packaging of the Arc de Triomphe, the burial of the Parisian monument under 25,000 square meters of silvery blue fabric that his uncle, Christo, who died in May 2020, had dreamed of, and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who died eleven years earlier. Indifferent to the din of traffic on Place de l’Etoile, a hundred workers are busy day and night around the building built at the beginning of the 19th century.e century. Several times postponed, in particular because of the pandemic, the date of the inauguration is set for September 18, the end of the event on October 3.
Vladimir Yavachev does not seem feverish, however. He is used to pharaonic operations. Since he was 17, he has been closely accompanying the projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. A few days before his death, in New York, where he had lived for decades, after exile in France from his native Bulgaria, his uncle begged him to continue packaging as planned. “He repeated to me: ‘Promise me that you will do it, no matter what, promise me!’ “, he reports, in English with a Bulgarian accent, that thirty years spent in the United States have not erased.
410,000 barrels of empty oil
This September 18, therefore, he will see the culmination of this very long-standing project. Visitors will run to the Arc de Triomphe, as they had come to observe the Pont-Neuf packed in 1985. They will post images on social networks, comment, criticize or praise the work. But Vladimir Yavachev will already have his head elsewhere, far from Paris.
Just before his death, Christo snatched from his nephew another oath: that he finally realize the dream that has obsessed him for forty years, a structure made up of 410,000 barrels of empty oil in the desert of Abu Dhabi, including the shape would evoke a mastaba, an Egyptian necropolis. For decades, the project, which intersects contemporary Western art, the Arab world and economic issues, has been a sea serpent.
The ambition is dizzying, even for a couple used to pushing the limits. By its size, first of all, 150 meters high – “Higher than the pyramid of Kheops”, emphasizes Vladimir Yavachev -, on a basis of 300 meters. Either the largest sculpture in the history of mankind. The steel structure is said to weigh 50,000 tons, be four times the volume of the Eiffel Tower and be able to withstand sandstorms. Two years should be necessary to erect a skeleton composed of pylons, which, by an ingenious mechanism, rise to form the Mastaba.
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