"It's raining, it's getting wet. It's party time for the frogs," goes the French children's song. But rain also means party time for the ephemeral fountain designed by scenographer, visual artist and performer Alix Boillot, 31, at the large courtyard of the cultural venue Les Subsistances in Lyon. Installed on Wednesday, May 3, in the center of the esplanade, and surrounded by tables for enjoying meals, the six-meter-in-diameter pool is connected with two smaller ones. It is blue, blue, blue like its title: Bleu. "Because it's a tribute to the Mediterranean and to water, which is our shared and universal resource, and a way for me to resanctify it," Boillot said. "It is a vital human right, and absolutely cannot be appropriated: it cannot become blue gold."

Boillot's ecological impetus finds its meaning and ethics in the very way this fountain functions. Aesthetically influenced by its Italian ancestors in the gardens of the Villa d'Este and the Villa Adriana, its technology relies on a system that recovers rainwater from the venue's gutters, which run off and fill the basins: 10,000 liters are stored on-site. "We're completely self-sufficient," said Boillot. In other words, if there is no rain, there is no fountain or jet of water. "It's impossible for me to imagine this installation in situ with city water," she said.

The weather and its unpredictable moods contribute to the "uncertainty" at the heart of the project. Since Boillot graduated from the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris in 2015, she has collaborated with directors Philippe Quesne and Robert Cantarella and choreographer Ola Maciejewska. She likes to create in a variety of forms, including sculptures, installations, stage sets and performances. The commonality among them is her quest "for a certain romantic, mystical, playful side of our human nature, which becomes attached to what has no value other than what we accord it: poetry, belief, the ephemeral, the immaterial."

Water, snow and ice already figured among her favorite materials. For Adieu beauté (2021), she placed a Doric column fragment made of snow on a mountainside. In Ad vitam (2021), she immersed earthenware trophies in the sea and a river. The column was meant to melt and the pottery will dissolve, demonstrating the evanescence of art and being: Boillot advocates for "the non-event, sober dreaminess, the humility of the gesture."

With Bleu, she worked with rain for the first time. "I particularly like the idea of the verticality of rain, which settles horizontally on the earth, [and] its evaporation, which returns to verticality," she said. "Within the same cycle, there's a constant transformation." Rain or shine, the fountain, decorated with Medici salt vases, remains a gathering point for people passing through Les Subsistances. When full of water, it plays its role and encourages water games, especially for children. When empty, it raises questions about the absence of water, its fragility and disappearance.

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