NAXOS

Suite à son voyage de noce dans la mer Égée, Adolf Loos, architecte pionnier de la modernité, publie son pamphlet "Ornement is crime". En résidence à Naxos, au cœur de ce même paysage, j'enquête sur le blanc omniprésent des Cyclades qui a inspiré cette modernité.
J'enquête, dans ce blanc, sur l'ornement que la modernité a rejetté.

LE PAYSAGE

En utilisant la géométrie des miroirs Fresnel, 9 panneaux en haut-relief, décomposent et transmettent les couleurs de lumière de l'environnement : dans le blanc pur de la poudre de marbre, apparaissent les teintes des montagnes (de l'ocres au pourpre), et du ciel (du bleu au jaune brillant). En juxtaposant ces lumières les unes aux autres, en les déposant sur ce médium blanc qui fait l'architecture de l'île, ce tableau dépeint une des essences de ce paysage.
L’œuvre est située dans son environnement. Elle a des coordonnées gps. Dans les marges de ce haut-relief, des fragments de cartes de l'île l'attache au lieu..

L'ÉTÉSIEN

L'étésien est un vent du nord puissant de la mer Égée : chose rare, la façade de la résidence y est totalement exposée (rare, car l'urbanisme vernaculaire de l'île est fait pour s'en protéger). Avec le temps, il a creusé l'enduit et fait apparaître un ornement : transfiguration du vent dans la matière. Aujourd'hui, on prépare la rénovation de l'a façade. Je fais donc l'archéologie préventive de ce petit fragment de quotidien, de ce monument sans ouvrier ni architecte. Je prélevé ce motif, ornement du climat, pour le figé dans le temps et dans le blanc. Chacune des trois pièces, montre 9 fragments de la façade. Composée comme des cartes dépliés, cet atlas nous projette dans un voyage immobile.

"PORTARA"

Chaque soir, en septembre, des centaines de personnes se dirigent vers Portara. Touristes oisifs, certains en tuniques blanches, marchent en procession vers le temple d'Apollon pour fixer le soleil. Culte païen ou culte du soi et d'instagram... là se rencontrent dans les faits, les corps, l'architecture, le paysage et un évènement cosmique : une piste de la sobriété.
Une série de dessins décrit les gestes esthétiques, populaires, vains et impossibles, que font en masse ces personnes pour faire tenir le soleil dans leurs mains.

LE MONDE

Colera, Portbou and Cerbère are allegories of a frenetic modern time, that came to fade. What would one think of its languor, and should we wish for this idle land to regain some activity ? Maybe we could plan to restore the flamboyance of the cumbersome logistics industry it once was, or maybe it could benefit from a depleted tourism that exhausted the Costa Brava. Maybe one could think of something else, new, and cleverly benchmarked... Eventually something will come, however for now, a loose life remains, gentle and harsh at the same time, anachronistically (or premonitory) slow, but with deep passion.

It seems that the state of crisis can’t stop figuring out new ways to sustain itself through time. It gets harder and harder to have certainties yet, one thing we can say is that, today, we have more time to spend than anything else to regain prosperity. City attractiveness is indexed on the quantity of heavy things we move from here to there, whatever energy it disperses. In the current economy, pouring concrete is a program in itself, and it remunerates each actors of its implementation. To build, to abandon, and to rebuild slightly differently is not only for the better, it is also about maintaining the acceleration of trade flow. Yet, each time it dried up, we came to realize how fast the quest for velocity brought us to fail ; yet again, each time it dries up we languish from immobility.
We came to think about slowness as both, a resistance to exhausting exhilaration, and a cure for the boredom of paralysis. Sobriety is mandatory but it is not quiet a project yet, whereas slowness brought to a model, can value solidity. Within spatial practices, it would translate into carrying, cultivating and sustaining, rather than building and delivering. That is almost Buckminster Fuller’s motto « doing more with less », but with extra-time to scrutinize « the less ». Considering Colera, Portbou and Cerbère, and the quantity of material that has been moved around and forgotten about: what a lab to understand how to turn each m2•kg/s2 of a new work into a temple. Matter is available, and if one’s eye works enough, it perceives that it already bears satisfactions in itself. From Colera, to Cerbère, one can visit a lot of reveries, with the smile of esthetic exaltations only pictures of cracked worlds produce.

TRAVELLING WORLDS

From, Colera to Cerbère, everything is made of massive objects. It’s Spanish and french built, made for defense and exchange : it’s heavy and thick, designed to accommodate millions of tons and cannonballs. There are magnificent ruins, magnificent buildings, breathtaking panoramas, romantic skies and wine to fall for... the train stations are three=times=too-big functioning platform, there is a cultural and touristic activity, people hike and motorcycle, dwell, buy and sell... there is a slight animation,within three=times=too-big spaces.

One sense of esthetic would get rid of the abandoned and dysfunctional, wishing to use this rich patrimonial and natural heritage, as a set for renewed splendors, and vivid activities. We think about potential and activation... but unless miracle, everything’s too massive to consider strategic ulterior motives.
But then, the more we explore, the more this esthetics of moral, which likes lively streets, the well restored and the well composed, feels boring. The exploration unveils singular places time has left to some cultivated neglects. Moving within the area, one’s mind peints a thousand of pictures from the intense diversity of situations beard within only 16 km. One sees glorious architectures fading, trucks moving with care on alleys about their size ; one passes before people languishing nicely and harshly, in social housing’s collective spaces ; one feels the needles that have grown through defection of south slopes, or the slight alterations the careful hand of a left-behind brought... one crosses slabs on which automaton slides and blows, one climbs on gardens where only water grows... Time has fulfill the enormous matter of this landscape, with the contrats of its action, whether things grow, wear from sea and air, are repaired with care or reused at optimum... The atmosphere seize more than the eyes : it revives our sense of feeling time passing. All, from the functioning to the ruins, are adding up to an Atlas of intangible qualities. What this world do, is to make us discover the sweet esthetics of lethargy, and few kilometers are enough to feel like adventures in some forgotten space. We have time now, to value the care dispensed by languor, and the healing capabilities to feel time flowing tranquilo : that’s the project.

ATLAS

We discovered three paths of complete enjoyment. It’s intense, not with easy access, and a little wild. It does not lead to picturesque and preserved sceneries. On the contrary, these are a succession of cultivated contrasts time has left behind for someone to care for. Those walks, they infringe upon the esthetics of moral without being a quest for romantic neglect. If one follows it, one accepts its discomfort and risks (the discomfort of a half- collapsed stair, of needles covering the clothes, of the withstanding bush, of trespassing limits that only unease draws). These are invitations to abandon oneself to the pleasure of drift which revitalises our threshold capacities. It stimulates the body with envies for spatial thrills, and it takes us to sceneries of elsewhere and rejuvenating time. As «the quest for sensorial experience from the world is the best way to know oneself »¹ we won’t change the world, but we may change ourselves.
Like all explorers and conqueridor de camins, we draw maps, we collected treasures, and we wrote diaries of discoveries and encounters in pandemic times.

1 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics, 1980

LE 15 MARS 2020

«Nous nous ennuyons dans la ville, il n’y a plus de temple du soleil (…) Nous ne prolongerons pas les civilisations mécaniques et l’architecture froide qui mènent à fin de course aux loisir ennuyés. Nous nous proposons d’inventer de nouveaux décors mouvants. L’obscurité recule devant les salles climatisées : la nuit et l’été perdent leurs charmes, et l’aube disparaît. L’homme des villes pense s’éloigner de la réalité cosmique et ne rêve plus pour cela. La raison en est évidente : le rêve a son point de départ dans la réalité et se réalise en elle. »¹

Je veux dédier le temps de cette résidence à faire le récit des actions de ce territoire. On nous a prévenus : la transition est une préoccupation devant laquelle les Potringus et Sanclaudiens ne sont pas crédules. Et les premières rencontres ont pu vérifier l'intuition : à ceux qui nous ont demandé avec défiance nos prescriptions, nous avons répondu dans les termes du projet : “vous en êtes à l’acte ; nous sommes venus, témoins... Ailleurs, nous racontons cess projets et ces paysages, et l’auditoire est ébahi. Avignon-Lès-Saint-Claude c’est comme le temple de Delphes où réside la Pythie. ”
Car l'écologie de ce territoire a ce sens de réalité.
Nous l’avons entendu : « je n’avais jamais vu le pré si sec », « il y a deux étés, on pouvait pas parler sans avaler de pyrales », « pas de neige à Noël et skie en avril = moins joli » ; « ma dernière ruche est morte il y a quelques temps [...] pour la première fois cet été, le puis a tari ».
Qui voit sa nature si bouleversée de l’effet nu du changement ? Ailleurs, il y a toujours des diversions : « y’a plus d’eau dans l’Artière... mais c’est surtout ce p*ain de Limagrain qui pompe tout en amont ».

Nous voyons vos Charybde et Scylla : sous vos yeux, les paysages changent, les forêts changent, les champs changent, les rivières changent... Et il y a cet écho lointain de réprobation : injonctions à la maitrise de votre mobilité (votre dernière dépense), venant de ceux (urbains) qui "à l’amour ont choisi le vide-ordure automatique".

Car l’action politique, ses pieds ne touchent que le tapis des métropoles sans en connaitre les terroirs ; elle aura, par exemple, abattue votre premier prototype de centrale : ce projet de bon voisinage énergétique qui exploite l’agilité de la nouvelle condition diffuse de la technologie. Vous avez dessiné les cadastres solaires ; vous aviez choisi la gouvernance par bassin de vie, inquièt du trajet des électrons dans le réseau... et ça a été saboté. Tout ça doit laisser un goût amer, alors que c'est votre paysage qui change le premier sous l’effet de la nouvelle chimie du ciel.
Enfin... vous savez tout ça...
Qu’est-ce que l’hacienda ?
Un lieu d’échange de conseils en probité où l’un dit à l’autre : « si tu as ton toit à refaire, une installation d’énergie ça vaut le coup » ; « ouèè, la cellule photovoltaïque elle vient encore de Chine et ça rejette du CO2, avec le même crédit d’impôt pense au thermique : plus simple et ça marche... on ne chauffe plus autrement » ; "ce serait bien de réhabiliter les anciennes citernes pour stocker les pluies du printemps", "faudrait éclairer le terrain de foot (celui au milieu de la forêt)"... S’enivrer, d’envies de faire, de pulsions d’actions légères... spontanément émerge, l’hypothèse de l’énergie collective.

L'Hacienda du 15 mars 2020 : Faire de l’énergie une expérience naturaliste, simple et instinctive, aussi économe que d’être ému par un coucher de soleil de vacances. Contempler l’énergie non raffinée : prêter sa part à une machine collective, dermo-calorique ou à éblouissement du thalamus. Ce sont ces horizons qui nous apparaissent en phosphène, à la fonte de nos tableaux de cire blanche. Nous modelons des horizons lumineux avec des écailles de Pirarucu. Un champ brillant sur un pré au-dessus d’une chapelle, un toit pour accueillir les esprits chassés des forêts qui sèchent et des épicéas fanés. Une annonce météo : localement il fera 85°C à 16h à Avignon-lès-Saint-Claude, une fenêtre en parenthèse du soleil d’octobre.

Nous avons 48 machines solaires. Elles font l’archive d’un paysage en transition : des volutes de scolithes, d’épicéas fanés, de reprises de buis sous la première neige, de chrysalides de pyrales, de peaux de vers. Cette tapisserie de cire d’abeille raconte ce moment particulier pendant lequel ces choses existaient encore et déjà. Par-dessus cet herbier coloré qui fige le changement en 48 mouvements synchronisés : s’enregistrera la latitude, l’heure, la date, le climat, le vent, chaque nuage, chaque voile dans le ciel :

12h00 : allumage de la machine 190°
15h00 : allumage de la machine 210°
17h00 : extinction et récupération des enregistrements du climat du 15/03 à l’@hacienda.avignon

Ce sera mon dernier jour dehors : on a regardé le soleil bien dans les yeux, 48 fois. On n’a eu un petit public : ce sont les circonstances. Circonstances ; un fragment éphémère de temple du soleil a annoncé sans le vouloir, un autre grand changement.

1 Gilles Ivain, Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau, 1958

Collective Energy

Cinquecento Soli was first shown in May 2018 in Rome, as part of the exhibition « Take me (I’m yours) », curated by Christian Boltanski, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Chiara Parisi.
220 reflecting surfaces are collectively organized and individually adjusted to project 220 sunsets into the north-east oriented Loggia of the Villa Medici. The 31st of May, 220 mirrors shifted the Cosmos toward the Villa, as people witnessed the first ever sunset this space had known for 430 years.

The installation was conceived alongside a study on our cultural relationship to energy, as an allusion to the infrastructural landscape emerging in the Mediterranean’s backcountry. It stood as a phenomenological experiment of the contemporary energetic city which territory extends far from its formal limits. As we were focusing on the production of architecture in this landscape, and on the perspectives we could bring to it, we followed two intuitional paths for 500 soli’s conception: Analogue design and Collective energies The installation covers a 35 x 50 m area. It is made of 55 timber pillars distributed on a radial grid. Despite the topographic variations of the Piazzale, each one is standing straight in relation to Earth, and despite its large span, each one is turned the same way towards the sun. The 55 pillars are holding 220 mirrors, individually adjusted to project the reflection of the setting sun to the single space of the Loggia. The installation is built as an individual spatial and temporal experiment, to which we, planners and craftsmen, found ourselves unrelated. Our aesthetic choices, the conceptual and building processes, the layout and the alignments... every of our design decisions were part and parcel of the phenomenon it sought to produce. That’s why it is large and that’s why we aimed for perfection : so it can turn experiential.

The 31st of May, as twilight came, the three-hours phenomenological experiment begun : 500 Soli turned to be a spectacular lecturer of our potential for relating to energy and its substances. The 31st of May, just as plants, many were gathering enthusiasm directly from the sun, just as if they got energized through air and rays. The 31st of may, we witnessed that we could all, instinctively and collectively, use our forgotten photo-receptive cells and synapses to produce a collective energy.

500 soli is one of our first art installation, but that doesn’t mean it has no depth. It has all the depth of years of practice and thinking and projects and drawings… just as if the memories of each and every of our previous works (we had frustratedly done on paper) offloaded into our arms and our screwdrivers and gave birth to the perfect prototype at first attempt. It took us two weeks to conceive, built and install everything. It will take us years to fully understand what we’ve achieved, as the emotional power of the installation is absurdly disproportioned compared to its crafting.

The installation was designed and built alongside a research lead at the Villa Medici on our cultural relationship to energy and its substances which axiom is as follows : we stand at a shifting period of ours where Nature, through its many expressions of violence is challenging every aspect of a modernistic culture built over a blinded confidence into progress. But as Bruno Latour stated, this last has always failed at producing anything but « hybrids»: never has any technical breakthrough been able to solve an issue, and never have its implications refrain from expending out of its area. This way, not only is our technique unable to lead us to some significant progress due to its lack of foresight of interactions, but also the impact of its application tends to worsen some conditions standing out of its scope of expertise or boundaries of governance. And should one overlook the way we are addressing the ecological crisis, one would get the immediate feeling that something, lying deep in our poor abilities of awareness, is dis-empowering us of consistent actions. The resistance we had proofed into learning about complexities of Nature (in the broader of its sens) is such that one could feel our culture was all built upon the belief that We Will Vanquish; culture versus nature eternally. And so we are: still expecting we can face each issue one after the other, without precautions, without predictions, without integration, by adding little knowledge to our global dysfunctional know-how; and even when everything is backlashing to our face.
And how does the ecological concern affects our built landscape? By adding tools and regulations to the designer’s production. And in this process, this last is finding himself narrowed to arranging, again and again, the same materials in the same manners; thus seeing a new, ever-the-same, everywhere-the-same, landscape of boredom emerging. Yet the architectures of energy have beautiful definitions: it is of the Cosmos, of the fluids and the climates, bearing the opportunity to reform our aesthetics and the matters of our mesmerization.

The Villa Medicis is a Renaissance Palazzo. It is built on a hilltop (the Pincio) alongside a Renaissance garden which was designed as both a place for Nature and a gallery to display the art collection of its owner. Therefore, the south-west city-facing facade is plain and sober: to Rome, it is a massive silhouette turning bright orange at twilight, overhanging the overcrowded and mineral Piazza Di Spagna. But for the one invited in, its north-east garden-facing facade is a museum of antic art with views on the peacefulness of Nature. Dug in the center of the building’s volume, mirrored to the grand salon, is the Loggia: a sizable open-air room that conveys people to the gardens through a Palladian-window like opening: a place for beauty and contemplation that has never seen a sunset. Thus the idea was simple: flipping the Cosmos around the Villa and making the sun sets in the Loggia for the first time in 430 years.
We turned ourselves to the objects of our study: the aesthetics and characteristics of the piece would be borrowed to the modern techniques of energy production (when looked at, through the prism of our own perspective). The installation organizes 220 reflecting surfaces (precisely arranged in space and adjusted individually) into an architecture alluding to the infrastructural landscape emerging in the Mediterranean’s backcountry. Thus being for the viewer (the urban highly educated visitor of the exhibition) a first phenomenological experiment of the diffuse and out-of-sight condition of the contemporary energetic city, which territory extends far beyond its formal limits. Therefore, while questioning the local implication of energy production, the piece becomes an invitation to explore a landscape unknown to the visitor, using images of an object he is familiar with.
Focusing on energy and its inherent production of architecture got us to two intuitional paths, the two principles of 500 soli’s conception: Collective energy \ Analogue

I, digging !

The first of intuitions;
no narration nor metaphor preceded
dig first,
big enough,
and see first.
This strain is two century-old. On October 2017, without mechanical means, I removed five tons of soil from the garden of the Villa Medici, and revealed 200 years of natural history.

How much of Rome’s architecture are pines ? How much are they associated to every of the city’s aspects, its many times and many places ? From the Pincio to the ruins of the Fori, along Via Appia or any roads in Latina...
Shall one follow pines, one finds Rome. We have this friendly relationship to them : they are the numerous timber towers sculpting the city ; they plan paths and show ways to the outskirts and beyond ; they are the soulful shadows of Grand Tour paintings’ backgrounds, eloquent in being liken to the eternal city. Yet those giants have other goals and means much more unfamiliar to us. Beneath the surface lies the stage of an other act : an act of soil chemistries and hydraulic states, a micro-topographical stage of geological stratas. In this Kingdom, each tree measures its space, evaluates the consistency of its thick environment, fights and cooperates: with its neighbors, with evolving ecosystems, with the upsides of roads and canals...
We’ve built landscapes, to please the eye, to bind cities to their dependencies, to show the ways to political powers. Beneath the surface lies the oneness of the ecologies of our ‘scapes. It has strong plastics, and understands well.
We see incredulous and with dread that we haven’t figured out much yet.

PERSPICACITY
As attentive to the landscape and biochemical transformation of the tree we were, we also documented the evidences of the perspicacity of a living tree.The whole plastic we’ve unearthed is also to be seen as an historical record of events happening in the soil’s chemistry.
For 200 years, this tree has lived through many different times. It has seen the beginning of the anthopocene, it has know years of smog and high carbon usages, it has known the petroleum crisis, it has lived through the creation of Rome’s underground (piazza d’Ispagna station is right under the Villa), it has lived through the 1963 winter...
And all of this, he has registered in its roots. Root architecture is contextual : it react to the chemistries and climates of the underground and atmosphere. This intelligence and this capacity of understanding of a context is yet not always clear : evidences of a highly predictive understanding of its environment were laying next to, bellow or on top, empirical explorations of its surrounding.
Indeed, for Pr. Stefano Mancuso, pines are shy : they don’t interact with each other, they don’t touch each other, they don’t communicate about the ways to go, the spaces to explore.
It’s looking for those mysteries that drew, thinking that lying behind this wood, was an ecological history of our modernity.

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Mediterraneo is a territorial corpus and a performative methodology of work, holding our production into one distinctive scope of study. It questions the bounds existing between energy and climate’s identities and Mediterranean habitability.

Mediterraneo is a process of exploration. It starts with an extensive use of cartographic tools, historical data, narrations, intuitive “correspondences”. It develops into drifts, interviews and photographic or video reports.

Mediterraneo is a project-maker. From a growing corpus of situations hold in a comprehensive whole _our research_ it roots or stand as the material for distinct projects.

LE FUTUR

Le premier pas de l’homme sur la Lune a fissuré l’humanité. Certains se tournèrent vers la Terre, parce que nous y sommes scellés... à ce gros bateau qui prend l’eau. D’autres n’eurent qu’une idée, trouver le moyen d'abandonner le navire. Le grand récit de l’énergie commence et son introduction est la prédiction d’un cataclysme entêtant.

Le futur nous verra-t-il comme le peuple des suffocants? Nos éoliennes seront-elles les vestiges mornes d’un culte aux vents : saluez sans rompre, bras blancs !
Un futur Homère dira-t-il : ainsi, les hommes innombrables, nourries par la terre, ayant profité de tous les cadeaux qui leur ont été fait, firent une offrande de grandes voiles d’airain au dieu qui souffle sur les crêtes et dans les plaines pour l’apaiser dans son âme, mais ce dernier, irrité de ne recevoir que le plus pâle métal, s’arma de foudres et de tempête et les frappa tous, uns à uns ?

Les lieux de la production sont lointains et laissée à la discrétion des techniciens qui seuls légifèrent sur leurs règles du jeux. Ici, nous examinons la capacité architecturale de la nouvelle condition technologique de notre énergie et peut-être ainsi donner à ce sujet un souffle heureux et léger.


Buckmister Fuller brevetait des structure en aluminium, construisait des bulles en polycarbonate dans les ateliers de l’université et rêvait de couvrir les villes de verre. «Your Private Sky» - vision frénétique d’un progrès (non réalisé).
La campagne invente un filet pour se protéger de la grêle. Récolte maigre, elle le tisse plus fin pour moins d’ombre (moins de 5%), puis elle le colore, (positivement photoséléctivement). La campagne invente, teste rectifie, teste et améliore, expérimente, à l’échelle 1, dans l’espace - démarche effrénée de progrès (in progress).
Tout, change, vite, bruit, et aucun temps pour aucun de contempler, de chercher une vision ou une référence.
Pour Louis Kahn l’Homme demeura changé lorsqu’il compris que la lumière était blanche et pas jaune et que l’ombre était noire et pas bleue. L’ombre est rien et l’architecture est lumière.
Ces filets sont l’architecture d’un espace dessiné au photon près spéculaire et coloré.
Positivement photoséléctif à 5% d’ombre.
Jaune.
Joy.
« Doing the best with the least »
Enjoy.