becoming-carmen-travel-france-paris-centre-pompidou-exterior-pipes — **There are places in Paris that demand attention even before you step inside.**

The Centre Pompidou is one of them—an architectural gasp in the heart of the Marais, unapologetically radical, its tangle of pipes and primary colours surging above the cobblestones like the city’s own exposed circulatory system.

On a grey morning, I found myself crossing the street, the metallic tang of rain in the air, drawn to the museum’s latest headline-making exhibition by Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us. As someone who has always been obsessed with the intersection of place, memory, and the everyday poetry of images, this show felt like an invitation not just to look, but to feel. And let’s be honest—it’s rare to walk into an art space that’s about to close for five years of transformation, knowing you’re witnessing both an ending and a beginning.

Centre Pompidou: A Parisian Icon Reinvents Itself

If you’ve ever wandered the winding lanes of the Marais and caught a flash of blue, green, and red pipes rising in the distance, you’ve glimpsed the Centre Pompidou. Since its inauguration in 1977, this museum has become a symbol of Parisian avant-garde spirit, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with a vision to turn the architecture inside out. Its bold, colour-coded exterior—blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity, red for movement—remains instantly recognisable, and the museum’s logo, a series of geometric lines, echoes the building’s industrial whimsy. The Pompidou isn’t just a museum; it’s a living, breathing machine for modern art, a place where the boundaries between public library, contemporary art, and street culture blur deliciously.

But now, we’re on the cusp of a new era. From 2025 to 2030, the Centre Pompidou will close its iconic Parisian building for an ambitious, much-needed renovation. Bold banners draped across the scaffolding announce a metamorphosis, and Pompidou’s spirit of experimentation and openness is very much alive—perhaps nowhere more so than in how it has handed the reins to Wolfgang Tillmans for its last major exhibition before the big pause.

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Wolfgang Tillmans: Traversing Themes and Media

Wolfgang Tillmans, born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968, is a name that pulses through the veins of contemporary photography. He’s a chronicler of subcultures, a documentarian of the overlooked, and a poet of the everyday. His work, spanning nearly forty years, has never settled for easy categories—portrait, still life, abstraction, documentary, installation, music, activism—all of it coalesces into an aesthetic language that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant. Tillmans’ background is inseparable from this exhibition; his early fascination with astronomy, his immersion in the queer nightlife of London and Berlin, and his relentless curiosity about the material and digital world all find their way into this show. It’s no surprise that the Centre Pompidou, with its own legacy of breaking and remaking boundaries, would invite Tillmans to stage its grand farewell before renovation.

“Culture is always the first thing autocrats seek to control.”

— Wolfgang Tillmans

“Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us”: A Sprawl of an Exhibition

Stepping into the vacant Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi) at Pompidou, I felt the strange hush of a space in transition. Tillmans has transformed 6,000 square metres into a living archive—an installation that refuses chronology, instead letting the architecture dictate the flow. The exhibition is a constellation of works: photographs, videos, sound pieces, personal objects, and even sections of library shelving left deliberately bare. It’s a visual and emotional sprawl, at times exhilarating, at times overwhelming. The exhibition title itself hangs in the air like an incantation, a reminder of the paradoxes that define our times.

Some works hit me with unexpected force. Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast IV is a vast wall of TV static, hypnotic and chilling, evoking both nostalgia for analogue days and the anxiety of information overload. How on earth has silence and noise swapped places in our culture?

Pompidou CLC photocopies reimagines the museum itself, mixing colour separations and blurred architecture into something strangely alive, almost breathing. I loved how these pieces echoed the building’s sense of play and its refusal to be pinned down.

And the Photocopy room is pure Tillmans: three working copiers, piles of stamped papers, and the invitation for visitors to make their own multiples—a playful ode to democratic art-making and ephemeral memory.

But I’ll admit, there were moments when the exhibition’s mix of genres—still life, portrait, abstraction, archive, activism—felt dizzying, almost confusing. At times, I craved more narrative, more structure. Yet, there was something deeply relatable in this chaos. The themes of globalisation, Brexit, Covid-19 isolation, the fragility of bodies and borders, the relentless churn of media—these are the realities of our lives, and Tillmans doesn’t shy away. Instead, he gathers the fragments and lets them speak, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension. It’s not always easy, but it’s honest. And in a world that’s changing faster than we can process, maybe that’s precisely what we need.

Thoughts

Leaving the Centre Pompidou after this exhibition, I felt a kind of melancholy joy. This building, with its wild pipes and open escalators, has always represented experimentation and freedom. Now, as it prepares for a new chapter, Tillmans’ work feels like a fitting coda—a meditation on change, uncertainty, and the radical beauty of the present. Museums, like people, are always in a state of flux; the Pompidou’s upcoming renovation isn’t an ending but a reminder that art spaces must evolve alongside the societies they serve. As I walked back out into the Paris streets, the colours of the Pompidou still vibrant against the grey sky, I felt grateful to have witnessed this strange, magnificent intersection of art, architecture, and life. It’s a bizarre notion indeed to think that by the time I’m back in Paris, the city—and at least some of its art—will never be quite the same again.

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