Jean-Philippe Basello / Eric Stephany
Le Corbusier tried to re-define architecture on a human scale, by re-defining a system of measurement no longer metric but directly adapted to human morphology by a new system associating, with the Modulor, the body’s dimensions with that of the golden number, replacing one system of standardization by another.
Architects, like designers, are forever confronting their projections with their necessary uses, at the risk of seeing their vision led astray by its material execution. This final session of the season of Scores (Performances) proposes associating two revolutionary approaches, in both literal and figurative senses, to design and architecture. Eric Stephany evokes the figure of the contemporary architect of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Lequeu—better known for his utopian visions than for his actual constructions, because, during his career, the architect only managed to erect two “follies” in the environs of Nantes—through a research project embarked upon in 2013, which is here wound up in a performative form, with the presentation of the project’s sculptural version at the Musée Nivola in Sardinia, this summer. Jean-Philippe Basellopresents the ContreDesignKing Kong in the City agency, a company which he founded, and which aims to upset the very principle of design. If “design creates a world on a human scale, counter-design reminds man of the scale of the world.” (J-P. Basello).
Eric Stephany / The Index of Shadows
Since 2013, Eric Stephany has been developing a research project around a revolutionary architect, less for his contribution to architecture than through the freedom of his plates, which are as utopian as they are fantasized, the sole evidence of an egregiously original vision of architecture. At the end of the 18th century, Lequeu produced a “Treatise on the Science of Shadows and Wash”, for which he drew imaginary pavilions which were both poetic and surrealist, not to say pornographic, leaving two plates unfinished, including the index, mentioned but left blank, which Stephany proposes to re-interpret, responding to the extraordinary historical character by an index of forms. This verbal and formal lexicon combines sculptures, collages, fragile paper works, and photographs made using elements accumulated during his various travels and, in particular, during an extramural residency in New York, supported by the Institut Français.
An architect by training, Eric Stephany has shifted since the early 2000s from the architect’s office to the artist’s studio. Heir to a modernist postwar history of architecture, Minimal art, and Conceptual art, he is developing a work involving sculpture, installation and collage, based on an accumulation of poor materials, remains of maquettes, leftovers from building sites, but also those everyday images which invade our computers, which he readily compares to “monsters”, in other words, the rubbish of our cities. He is currently in residence at the Cité des Arts, and getting ready to embark on a new research project in India.
Jean-Philippe Basello / ContreDesign – Presentation of the new collection.
Trained at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, then artist in residence at the Ile-de-France Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Jean-Philippe Basello is both an artist and a businessman, developing for the past few years various Start-Ups, or rather Start-Outs, which are as surprising as they are ambitious, with a powerful potential for expansion. From the independent “chant dans la tête” label La Tête d’Orphée created in 2013, and his Academy in which everyone can follow courses in order to train their intensity and their perception of the infra chant, to the ContreDesignKing Kong in the City company, Basello responds to the economic world through new forms of companies with simplified activities, limiting the social object to forms that are as minimal as they are limitless. The different legal structures employed, from the company to the “loi 1901” (not-for-profit) association, are so many development tools at the service of much larger projects.
With the ContreDesign, Basello proposes an extremely ambitious alternative to the over-production of goods by the modeling of a system which contradicts the principles of design by re-inventing a measurement system no longer on the human scale, but on the scale of nature. “What is left of the refinement, the ingeniousness and the soul of design if, by dint of adapting to man, it adapts man? After reaching a certain point, design loses its legitimacy without counter-design.”
