The Baobab is an immersive and monumental work, straddling the boundaries between book, sculpture, and sound experience. Taking the form of a giant pop-up animated in augmented reality, this project invites the public to physically enter an open book, as if stepping into a living world.

The baobab tree, a guardian figure in many cosmologies, becomes a threshold here: a passage between the imaginary and the real, between childhood and memory, between matter and appearance.

Through this baobab tree, a guardian figure in many cosmologies, the aim is not only to offer a spectacular visual display. It is to bring forth a presence through paper, sound, and augmented images. To give substance back to what, in our contemporary world, tends to disappear: the sensitive connection to living things, slowness, listening, the capacity for wonder.

As in our projects La Forêt universelle (The Universal Forest) and Villes flottantes (Floating Cities), augmented reality is not a technological effect, but a form of symbolic reanimation. It allows the still image to come to life and become a meeting place. The pop-up becomes a theater of apparitions, where animals, voices, and tales emerge.

Baobab is also a reflection on time. The immediacy of digital technology contrasts with the long time required for artistic creation, cutting, illustration, and manual production. This work celebrates the fruitful friction between craftsmanship and innovation, between slowness and suddenness, between the tradition of books and contemporary immersive forms.