The exhibition “We built a fantastic palace at night…”, presented at Institut Giacometti, places side by side, in dialogue, original works and installations by the contemporary artist Petrit Halilaj, and a selection of works by Alberto Giacometti. Deeply marked by his childhood in Kosovo during the war, Petrit Halilaj has developed a practice in which individual and collective stories merge in spaces of freedom, not lacking in playfulness and lightness. Children’s drawing feeds his work, in which he opens an oneiric, even magical horizon, to sculpture; a dream-like space that echoes the part of childhood often detectable in Giacometti’s œuvre.

In an original installation devised by Halilaj, the exhibition weaves a subtle network of connections between Giacometti’s works and his own. Dreams, hopes but also worries and fears merge in fragile structures that enchant and reveal a capacity to communicate powerful imaginaries. Facing the feeling of a precarious world, the works of Halilaj and Giacometti mobilise a redeeming capacity for invention. The exhibition trail explores the collaborations between artists and children in the making of drawings, family bonds, the transposition of the pictorial vocabulary to sculpture in Giacometti’s major works like The Cage, and Apollon, but also the issue of scale in the apprehension of reality. From the tiniest of sculptures to pieces like The Couple (1927), Giacometti’s works blend in a visual environment set up by Halilaj.