The installation NOMAD chooses to inject program into a hyperarchitectural environment. !is programmatic occupation of the site will last the summer months, taking advantage of the highly frequented garden. Caravans, tents, carpets and stools: informal architecture, assemblage of recycled and transformed objects, the installation enables the domestication and the appropriation of a garden originally thought to be admired. Lightweight and mobile, five informal settlements provide spaces for events, refreshments and subsistence. Spread along the paths, in the glades and under the museum ship, they trigger interactions and create a new field of relationships. In the heart of the city, the dense vegetation is the set of a temporary occupation. Without fences or measurements, this territory is redefined, held, inhabited for a time.
Second-hand caravans, transformed and tuned, build the heart of those mobile units. They offer shelter to an info point, a sound-system, an ice cream van, a kindergarden and a stage, programs chosen for they capacity to generate interactions. Agricultural canvas, tight to the caravans, offer shade to an inviting floor of colorful carpets. Lightweight foldable wood furniture, inspired from the museum collections, can be spread according to needs. Detached from their context and aesthetized by the museography, many domestic objects presented in the musem exhibitions have lost any relation with their original function.
Inspired by the collections, the furniture created for NOMAD desacralizes and reintegrates those objects to where they belong, everyday life. The whole deployement can be removed in no time and leave the site without any marks. An architecture without bonds, but not without history nore territory: the caravans and their inhabitants, removed for a while from the national landscape, are integral part of the European culture - and way before this summer of 2010, when France hunted them down.
Museum of Arts and Civilisations, museum of Primal Arts, museum of Africa, Asia, Oceania and Americas? Let’s call it Museum of Quai Branly, this would avoid any ambiguity and misunderstanding. Beyond a polemic of designation, this is an institution which chooses to focus on extra-european cultures, however defining itself as a place where cultures are in dialogue. But the monologue is not a variant of the dialogue. This fixation on the «exotic» risks to block any parallels, any cultural exchanges and, above all, to impede any reflexion on occidental practices and cultures. The project chooses then to light against an euro-centrist vision of culture and its bigoted evolutionism. Indeed, if it is far from being absurd to expose those fascinating objects coming from cultures that we definitively know too less, their display should jeopardize our position - otherwise it is purely esthetics.
At a time when a billion humans are migrating throughout the world, often involuntary, nomadism becomes the horizon of art and society. It is about not looking away, about doing an humble autocritic, as from now on we recognize nomadism as part of our own culture, integrated in globalization.
NOMAD stops in the garden of the Museum Quai Branly to affirm contextualization against esthetization, diffusion against centralization, emancipation against homogeneization.
/NOMAD
4th. of June - 4th. of Septembre 2011
Jardin du Musée du Quai Branly. 222 Rue de l’Université. 75343, Paris cedex 07
/CREDITS
/ARCHITECT:1/100 architects. Leopold Banchini
Project leader: Guillaume Yersin. / Local architect: Paola Lucan. Consultant Sound System:Izet Sheshivari
Thanks to: Daniel de Roulet, Carmen Lopez del Valle
/CLIENT
Musée du Quai Branly. Patrice Chazottes
/REALIZATION
Studio Ad Hoc, Paris
Leopold Banchini was born in Geneva in 1981 and is an architect graduated from the EPFL (Ecole Polytechinique Fédérale de Lausanne). He is also Master in Architecture from the University of Lausanne (2007) and graduate of the Glasgow School of Art (2004).
Is a visiting professor in the HEAD (Haute Ecole de Design et) in Geneva since 2010 and Assistant Professor at the EPFL since 2009. He has also been Archozoom project designer in 2009.
Has been placed in Lot / ek Architects (New York) between the years 2004/2005, as an assistant project Art Basel (Basel) in 2005, and as a project partner of the collective Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) that same year in Rotterdam.
He has developed his work as an architect in b720 Arquitectos (Barcelona) during the years 2007 and 2008, and Group8 Architects (Geneva) in 2009.
In addition, since 2008 part of 1to100 Architects, and architectural collective based in Geneva. Its members have been active and decisive parts in projects such as the winning participation of Bahrain at the last Venice Biennale - RECLAIM Golden Lion 2011, exhibitions such as The Gulf - OMA-AMO's participation at the Venice Biennale 2007 and publications such as AMO-Rem Koolhaas's Al Manakh. Parallel to that, they conduce many different operations ranging from architecture, to journalism, until urban design. They have teaching positions at the EPFL and the University of Arts and Design in Geneva.
Its aim is to take position and initiate reflexions upon our contemporary environment.
Guillaume Yersin (Vevey-CH, 1981), architect and urban designer (Msc.Arch. ETH Zürich, 2009) from Geneva, Switzerland. Guillaume also has a Bachelor in Human Medicine from the University of Geneva (2003).
Is a guest professor at the HEAD (Haute Ecole d'Art et de Design) in Geneva since 2010 and Assistant Professor at the ETH Zürich since 2011.
After working for Lacaton&Vassal in Paris (2006), he took a decisive part in AMO's contribution for the Venice Biennale 2006 (The Gulf) and the following book AL Manakh (2007). He's been working for Prof. Kees Christiaanse at the ETHZ, as an active part of the research branch. Following that, on a grant from ETHZ, he spent 6 months of research in Tokyo. He's currently working on a publication based on a serie of interviews made with the biggest real estate developers in the Japanese capital. He's been developing his work as a architect and urban designer working for Hosoya&Schaefer as well as for HelsinkiZürich Office.
Since 2010, he is member of "1to100architects" in Geneva. With 1to100, he has been an active part of RECLAIM, Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale 2010, and recently completed NOMAD, a temporary public installation in the garden of the Museum Quai Branly in Paris.
He's currently working on a intervention in the city of Biel, Switzerland, together with BASK, from Zürich.
He recently joined the leading team for Christ&Gantenbein's contribution at the next Rotterdam Biennal 2012, Making City.
