More and more, Haute-Couture is cohabiting with art. The Maison Vuitton on the Champs-Elysées in Paris is an excellent example, combining a retail space for the brand’s luxurious collections with an artistic exhibition space. The Maison Hermès in Tokyo is a similar example.
A true architectural feat, the two narrow towers designed by Renzo Piano are veritable screens, 11 storeys high. Composed of over 13,000 glass bricks with hand-varnished exteriors, the façade reveals the moving silhouettes of visitors from the outside by day, and becomes a huge illuminated sign at night. There’s also a private cinema, a Le Forum exhibition space on the 8th floor and a small garden on the top floor.
From August 26 to November 23, 2010, Franco-Portuguese architect and artist Didier Fiuza Faustino presents “Agnosian Fields” at Espace Le Forum, Maison Hermès, Tokyo. This exhibition is not the first “collaboration” between the architect and visual artist and the Maison Hermès. In 2008, the architect created the “H-Box”, a nomadic projection space dedicated to video art that has since traveled from museum to museum.
Hand Architecture
Uncut House
The“Agnosian Fields” exhibition comprises two new installations and earlier works. It provides clues to the different scales and obsessions that underpin the architect’s work. Didier Fiuza Faustino wants to plunge visitors into a state of agnosia, a disorder of object recognition and perceptual amnesia. To achieve this, he explores the fields of architecture and contemporary art, as both creator and architect, focusing essentially on the tension between the body and its environment. The central dimension of his thinking is the body as a spatial component. He views his work as an architect through this notion, the relationship between the body and its environment.
Erase Your Head
Japanese audiences can discover the“Erase your Head” installation, an immersive micro-architecture for which English artist Russell Haswell has created a soundscape. A second installation, created in collaboration with Hiroya Oku, author of the Japanese manga Gantz, appropriates the piece entitled“Hand Architecture“.
HERMAPHRODITE
The installation is completed by the “Sympathy for the Devil” conversation lounge, while three pieces trace other trajectories between body and architecture: the“Uncut House” model, a Japanese private home open to its surroundings, and“The Naked Lunch“, a troubled object infiltrating domestic space that abolishes the distinction between public and private spheres through its functional and contemplative value. Last but not least, the artist presents the original prototype of the“Hermaphrodite” seat, which places its user in a position of ambiguity.
Naked Lunch
Sympathy For The Devil
Didier Fiuza Faustino is determined to shake up our perceptions with this exhibition. He examines our senses and their extension into space, as with his strange but aesthetically pleasing Hermaphrodite.
Architectural or artistic, his work always takes the body as a starting point for questioning our relationship with space. And he succeeds rather well.
August 26 to November 23, 2010
Maison Hermès 8F Le Forum
5-4-1, Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Sunday, 11 am to 7 pm.
Marie-Odile Radom
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
