(Letter by Le Corbusier to his mother on July 3rd, 1935)
An exhibition by Mélanie Feuvrier and Hugo Fortin.
Maison La Roche, Paris.
With Fondation Le Corbusier and Les Beaux-arts de Paris, and the generous help from Les Amis des Beaux-arts, Inapa France, Nuances Minérales and Ûfacto.
In numerous letters to family and friends, Le Corbusier willingly associates ideas and follows the thread of his imagination. He moves from one place to another and speaks of the resonances they have with each other in his mind and in his memories. During the first summer in his new apartment on Nungesser street in Boulogne, the garden on the roof-top terrace reminded him of the villa Le Lac in Switzerland. He evokes this resemblance like a retinal persistence to which -precise or vague- emotions and memories are tied up.
It is this intuition that we explore in our exhibition by moving the place of our residency (the apartment-studio on Nungesser et Coli street in Boulogne) into that of the exhibition (the Maison La Roche in Paris). By telescoping the apartment-studio in an abstract way (the choice of colors and the repetition of the mark left on the floor by the door of the bedroom) within the Maison La Roche, we insist on the essential fact that each place we visit is always inhabited by our own ghosts. To be present somewhere is always projecting other places and bringing back their irreparable absence.
During this two-month residency in the apartment-studio in 2019, our initial project evolved significantly. We collected the traces left by visitors in the form of sketches and drawings and eventually focused on the traces left by Le Corbusier himself. We asked ourselves: what was left of him there? Evidently it was the architecture itself and the space, but also the choice of paint colors on the walls (which the recent restoration has helped to highlight) and a mark on the floor of his bedroom left by the weight of the closet-door. This mark, as banal and insignificant as it is, miraculously evokes a bygone daily life.
This exhibition presents multiple graphite reliefs of this mark and displays them on panels painted with the exact colors of the apartment-studio walls. These colors are made by Nuances Minérales that uses the same pigments and the same processes as Le Corbusier. From this mark, we have also drawn a unit of measurement, in the manner of his famous Modulor, to establish the proportions of the exhibition.
Throughout this exploration, our work has focused on the question of presence and absence. If being in residency is, for an artist, being present in a place, the moment of the exhibition is necessarily that of their own absence. This is what we asked of the visitors. First at the apartment-studio by leaving a note or a sketch, the visitor had to confront their own presence in Le Corbusier's place of life and work. What effect did this have on them? Many found the request too demanding, almost unattainable, others approached the challenge with enthusiasm and a certain level of reserve as well. Through this gesture, we were asking them to do something difficult: what would remain of their passage?
In the exhibition, our approach is complementary, if not inverse. We transport the visitor into another space by presenting them with the residues of Le Corbusier. For perhaps that is what inhabiting a space is: always projecting something else, another place – distant memories. To be present, here and now, is perhaps impossible so much so that it convenes in us images and emotions of an absent past. We gauge our experience by what we know, what we have seen and what we have lived. A new place that we visit unfolds like a superimposition of layers that were slumbering in us, ready to jump out and reveal themselves.
