Emilio Ferro cuts a beam of white light through Paris’ Chapelle Expiatoire

Italian artist Emilio Ferro has transformed Paris’ Chapelle Expiatoire with Threshold, a site-specific light and sound installation that treats illumination as an architectural material rather than an effect.

Unveiled on 6 June 2026 for Nuit Blanche and commissioned by the City of Paris, the work inserts a concentrated beam of white light into the historic monument. Emerging from a metal structure, the beam extends across the chapel to form a luminous volume that appears almost solid despite its immaterial nature.

The installation is conceived around the idea of the threshold as both a physical boundary and a perceptual condition. Instead of remaining fixed within the chapel, the light changes its relationship with the building according to whether the monument is open or closed.

When the doors open, the beam reaches outward toward the surrounding garden. When the chapel closes, it withdraws into the interior and settles across its architectural surfaces. The movement turns the monument itself into an active component of the installation, continually negotiating interior and exterior, permanence and change.

Visitors further destabilise this condition. Bodies crossing the beam and moving through the chapel introduce shifts in viewpoint and perception, so the installation is never experienced as a single static composition.

Sound extends the work beyond the visible. Ferro developed an original composition from magnetic-field frequencies that he recorded and subsequently reworked, producing an acoustic layer that accompanies the luminous intervention without competing with the architecture.

Ferro’s broader practice investigates light and sound as tools for transforming spatial experience. At the Chapelle Expiatoire, that research is reduced to a particularly direct gesture: a single line of light makes the existing architecture newly legible while creating a temporary territory between material and immaterial space.

Project Credits

Installation: Threshold
Artist: Emilio Ferro / @emilioferroextra
Artist representation: Studio Artera
Commissioned by: City of Paris
Event: Nuit Blanche 2026
Location: Chapelle Expiatoire, Paris, France
Managed by: Centre des Monuments Nationaux (CMN)
Photography: Roberto Conte / @ilcontephotography
Year: 2026