Make yourself a(t) home

This lab.zone will explore the notion of feeling at home—a physical space where life happens and, despite constant change, a place where we leave our traces.
Inspired by Studio Mumbai's exhibition “An Architect of Breath” at the Fondation Cartier/Paris, where cutting-edge craftsmanship and economy of means come together with force, this lab.zone aims to put into practice ancestral skills that are in the same time specific and experimental.
The title of this Labzone is borrowed from issue No. 32 of SeeAllThis magazine, in which Indian architect Bijoy Jain says, “Home is where affection resides.”

Combining theoretical approaches and practical craftsmanship, the lab.zone will be divided into two parts.

The first semester will include a workshop on building and working with raw clay surfaces, a workshop on woodworking to make molds and/or structures, and a visit to a stonemason's workshop.
The raw earth workshop will be held in collaboration with the Origo.ch association in Charmilles. For three days, participants will work with an architect/ecobiologist to carry out pre-designed projects. After harvesting, preparing, and applying the clay, participants will take various paths to carry out their individual or collective research, which may take different forms: a space, a surface, an object/sculpture, or a performance.

In the second semester, as part of the sixth project of the ECART network (European Ceramic Art and Research Team), a week-long workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari, Italy, is being planned. In addition to visits to major sites in the region and the practice of majolica painting in the workshops of Grottaglie, the themes addressed will be the extraction of clay (working in a quarry) and the traveling miniature work, inspired by Marcel Duchamp's The Box in a Suitcase, 1942, by Marcel Duchamp, and the writings of Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, 1957.

*Network comprising: HEAD — Geneva, ENSAV — La Cambre in Brussels, the Villa Arson in Nice, and ESAP — Pavillon Bosio in Monaco

Image : Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai. Le souffle de l’architecte, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris 2023p. 43, ©Srijaya Anumolu / Studio Mumbai