Echoes of the Invisible

In spring 2026, about ten teenagers aged 13 to 17, in care at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital's adolescent psychiatry department, came to the Orsay several times to look at paintings and talk about them. A film crew recorded what they said.

That film is the centre of this one-room display. Their voices play over images of the works, and three of those works are shown beside it: Alexander Harrison's La Solitude, Félix Vallotton's Dinner by Lamplight and a small Camille Claudel bronze, L'Implorante. The idea came from Jad Bestautte, an art history student who won the museum's Orsay Lab call for 18 to 25 year olds. Mental health is never tackled head-on: it surfaces in the words the teenagers chose.

You watch the film, then look at the same three works with their words in your head. It is a short stop in Room 8c on the ground floor, included in the €16 timed ticket and free for under-18s and EEA residents under 26. Thursdays run until 9.45pm.