PARIS — This year, Paris didn’t slip back into la rentrée, that annual return from summer break to regular life, so much as lurch into it. What’s usually a seasonal shrug — crowded trains, humming cafés, full schools — has become a barometer of national discontent. Five prime ministers in two years, a fragmented National Assembly, and the steady rise of Marine Le Pen’s far right have left France polarized to the point of vertigo. Transport shutdowns, student blockades, and museum strikes have turned back-to-school rhythms into acts of protest.On a balmy September afternoon, just two days after large-scale protests opposing the austerity measures proposed by Prime Minister François Bayrou’s government took place, volunteers recruited via an open call of “everyone from 7 to 99” reenacted “Divisor” (1968), one of late Brazilian avant-garde artist Lygia Pape’s most iconic participatory performances, on the streets of Paris. The event opened the Festival d’Automne — a three-month celebration of dance, theater, music, performance, and visual art — and marked the inauguration of Lygia Pape: Weaving Space, the artist’s first solo exhibition in France at the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection.Installation view of Lygia Papes, works from Tecelares series (c. 1950s) in Lygia Pape: Weaving Space (photo by Eurídice Arratia/Hyperallergic)I arrived an hour before the performance and drifted through the rooms. The show is small but tightly curated, a compressed burst of some of Pape’s most emblematic works that showcases the breadth of her experimental practice across media. In one gallery, the short film “O ovo” (The Egg, 1967) plays. In it, Pape presses against the taut skin of a white cube on a beach, tears through, and crawls into the sand — geometry giving way to flesh. Across the room, a panoramic projection of “Divisor,” performed at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna in 2010, spans the wall. In a plexiglass case sits “Livro da Criação” (Book of Creation, 1959–60), a defining piece of Pape’s Neo-Concrete period. It takes the form of 16 artist books that unfold pop-up sculptural forms such as triangles flaring into fire, a fan unfurling a wheel, and a red disc becoming a clock — a cosmos animated by our hands. On display, too, is the monumental “Livro Noite e Dia III” (Book of Night and Day III, 1963–76), comprising 365 carved wooden units arranged into a shifting field of black, white, and gray that maps the daily swing between light and dark across a year. And a gorgeous grouping of the Tecelares, woodcut prints she made throughout the 1950s depicting labyrinthine geometric motifs, works as an anteroom for what is undoubtedly the showstopper: the dazzling “Ttéia 1, C” (2001–7), in which hundreds of copper wires stretch across a pitch-dark room lit by spotlights, an immersive sensory experience that itself changes with our movements.Lygia Pape, “Livro Noite e Dia III” (Book of Night and Day III, 1963–76), tempera, latex, and acrylic on wood, 365 pieces (photo by Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection, courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape)Back on the street, “Divisor” expands that same participatory principle to a collective scale. More than 100 participants ducked under a long white sheet, their heads popping through slits, as they spilled out from the rear of La Bourse’s imposing neoclassical facade and glided like a giant white amoeba across the esplanade toward La Canopée des Halles. Phones held high, some filmed themselves and their fellow travellers. The mood was upbeat, buoyant; small children at the front gave the procession a playful air.Walking alongside this strange, lovely spectacle, it struck me that “Divisor” endures because it makes us feel collectivity as a physical condition rather than a concept — the brush of hair, the weight of fabric, the awkward give-and-take with strangers, freedom tested in public space. Yet this reenactment carries a trace of its own scaffolding — the museum, social media, the logic of the festival. In that sense, the Paris edition of “Divisor” felt less like a time capsule than a pulsing diagnostic: a fleeting republic stitched from cloth, bodies, and hashtags.Performance documentation of Lygia Pape, “Divisor” (2025) in Paris (photo by Souleymane Said, courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape)Lygia Pape: Weaving Space continues at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection (2 Rue de Viarmes, Paris, France) through January 26, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Emma Lavigne with Alexandra Bordes.