A liveable sculpture. Thérèse by BUREAU
22/12/2022.
[Sergy] France
metalocus, DILYANA DRAGOEVA
metalocus, DILYANA DRAGOEVA
Description of project by BUREAU
This is a story that began in the Swiss mountains as in echo of the writings of the Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. This plot gave birth to Antoine, a peculiar architectural creature that welcomes many nomadic inhabitants and nature enthusiasts since 2014, offering them shelter inside the figure of the boulder. The story continues, becoming a short series with the appearance of a new member, Thérèse, built in 2022.
The novelist, Ramuz, gave a fictional life to the three characters. In their literary existence, they were thrown into a historic, tragic moment for the Swiss mountains that actually occurred in 1714, in the village of Derborence, as a major rock-fall from the Diablerets mountain range killed 15 people and hundreds of animals.
The husband, wife and uncle invented by the author inhabited, from the very beginning, the space of the novel and occupied the imagination of many readers. They have also, over the years, established themselves as cultural landmarks in that region of Switzerland: the novel is part of a regional and historical mountain culture.
Thérèse by BUREAU. Photograph by Dylan Perrenoud.
With the BUREAU’s involvement in these complex stories, another layer is added. The bodies of the novel’s characters Are once again metamorphosed, in this case from the fictional world, to become physical realities with non-human forms. They are transformed into rocks, embracing bodies that enclose flesh-and- bone inhabitants in their interior wooden architecture.
Thérèse emerges from this linage, continuing a multi-layered story that began with Antoine and extends its territorial reach, with the common feature that they both belong to artistic backgrounds. Thérèse’s host context is a piece of land where the artistic community of “Bermuda” has settled And developed its artistic and environmental activities. Antoine was instilled in 3-D Sculpture Park (Verbier) in the Swiss Alps.
Thérèse was thought and built along the same lines as Antoine, creating interconnected dependencies of art and other travelling communities. She is part of a territory constituted by networks of interconnected influences and affinities on which we depend, understanding the territory we occupy, but also a series of relational co-habitations.
Habitation is political here, as the two shelters are nowhere near commercial or speculative routes or agendas. They offer a place to many outside of Any financial or economic considerations, assuming their modesty.
Daniel Zamarbide has developed through the years a particular interest in the protean aspects of his discipline and nourishes his work and research through other domains like philosophy, applied and visual arts as well as cinema.
As a guest lecturer and jury he has been invited at a diversity of international schools and institutions to present and discuss his work and research.
Since 2003 his interest in research and education has led him to be invited as an assistant in the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and as a professor (2000-14) at the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in Geneva. In 2014, he integrates the team of ALICE Lab (Dieter Dietz) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a guest professor and research director.
In 2012, Daniel leaves group8 to start a new practice with Leopold Banchini, architect. Their practice, BUREAU A has explored during 5 years the possibilities of architectural making in a great variety of formats, opening the practice to work in the fields of art, garden and landscape architecture, exhibition design, temporary architecture and object making.
In 2017, following the dissolution of BUREAU A, Daniel Zamarbide pursues his more personal research interests under the name of BUREAU. This new entity produces architecture in the continuity of BUREAU A and incorporates to his already prolific activities furniture design (with a design brand of the same name) and an editorial project, which launches the first publication in June 2017.