Gimme Shelter: Didier Fiúza Faustino - "Architecture for disquiet bodies"

L'atelier di Didier Fiuza Faustino ha appena completato un edificio residenziale a Leira in Portogallo, il Martires Housing Complex. Si tratta del suo primo progetto di forte impronta architettonica e urbana.

In realtà questo progetto si inserisce in uno dei più interessanti e personali percorsi di ricerca attivi sul panorama internazionale, che Faustino prosegue dalla fine degli anni '90: una sperimentazione radicale nell'ambito del rapporto tra corpo umano e spazio. Una ricerca a cavallo tra architettura, arte, impegno sociale, installazioni e spazi multisensoriali.

"LAMPEDUSA" 2015, MAXXI, Roma

Didier Fiúza Faustino is a French - Portuguese artist architect, working on the relationship between body and space. At the crossroad of art and architecture, his practice is multi-faceted, ranging from installation to experimentation, from the creation of subversive visual art works to multi-sensorial spaces. His projects are characterized by their critical perspective and their ability to offer new experiences to the individual and collective body.

from BUREAU DESMÉSARCHITECTURES

Bureau des Mesarchitectures _ Martires Housing Complex, Leira 2024
Photo by Francisco Nogueira

MARTIRES HOUSING COMPLEX, 2024

"The project, which consists of seven apartments, is set within a renovated house and a new, semi-circular extension and seeks to disrupt domestic rituals to question everyday behaviours. The building makes manifest and negotiates some of the major tensions of urban housing, such as the interplay between protection or introspection and openness. It aims to reframe how bodies inhabit the city through our domestic structures. To a certain extent, its large windows and bold façade put the act of living on a stage – one performance alongside all the dramas of the city unfolding at once."

Martires Housing Complex - Photo by F. Nogueira

Martires Housing Complex, Leira 2024 - Photo by F. Nogueira

With Mésarchitecture (2002) in Paris and his office in Lisbon (2018), he is developing projects of multiple scales: interventions in public space, mobile architectures, as well as interior designs and buildings, among which French artist Jean-Luc Moulène’s studio.

Several projects and works are part of the collection of major institutions: MoMA, Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Serralves Foundation, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou, MAXXI, MAAT, FRACs Centre - Val de Loire et Grand Large - Hauts de France.

"LAMPEDUSA" - Foto Guillaume Viaud. Courtesy dell’artista, galleria Michel Rein e Galeria Filomena Soares

Il progetto "Lampedusa" [2015] appare 15 anni dopo "Corpo in transito" [2000]. È l'eco contemporaneo. Questo pezzo, una sorta di di faro o ancora di salvezza, si riferisce direttamente al dipinto La zattera della Medusa, di Théodore Géricault. È la rappresentazione di un dramma, un fermo immagine per esprimere umanità e disumanità e farci riflettere su questo momento di transito che è anche a momento di transizione, mutazione e trance. _ Didier Fiúza Faustino

from CNAP - Centre National Des Arts Plastiques

"BODY IN TRANSIT" - Photo curtesy galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris

"BODY IN TRANSIT"

"THE SHOW MUST GO HOME"

ONE SQUARE METER HOUSE, 2001 - 2006

Housing prototype
By reducing living space to its smallest unit, the square metre, the “One Square Meter House” prototype promotes a critical view of land speculation. Beyond this, it subverts the notions of habitability, adaptability and evolutivity. A body-trap that takes contemporary narcissism to its most absurd, “One Square Meter House” makes public space the only possible terrain for social interaction.

Photo: David Boureau / Florian Kleinefenn

"ONE SQUARE METER HOUSE" - Photo: D. Boureau / F. Kleinefenn

"For Didier Faustino, the process of the architect, artist, or designer must preserve an engagement with political, social, and cultural issues. Since founding his Bureau des Mésarchitectures in 2002, Faustino has developed an expressive multidisciplinary practice in art and architecture that highlights the complex relationship between the body and the spaces it inhabits. By challenging the boundaries of these spaces, his work explores the precarious equilibrium between public and private space, publicity and intimacy. Faustino’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions and has received several prizes, including the Académie d’Architecture’s Dejean prize for lifetime achievement in 2010. He currently divides his time among architecture (in Spain, Mexico City, Portugal), art (with exhibitions in Grenoble, London, and Rome), and teaching (AA School, Diploma Unit 2); and he is also editor-in-chief of the French architecture and design magazine CREE."

from Harvard University - Graduate School of Design - "Building Intimacy"

"FIGHT CLUB _ Le stade itinerant"

"In parallel to symbolic works such as Corps en transit, Faustino also develops objects designed to concretely disturb public order. They are benches, shelters, and lampposts to be installed in streets and to foster all manner of clandestine meetings and gang gatherings. Among these structures Fight Club (2004), a boxing ring surrounded by bleachers and closed off by fences, constitutes a “real space of deregulation,” “like a closed zone of non-law where the rules are determined by its users.”As an echo to this project, in a publication presenting his work as a series of booklets, Faustino (in the first booklet) cites a book on the Red Army Fraction, RAF Guérilla urbaine en Europe occidentale, 2006, in which the authors Anne Steiner and Loic Debray themselves cite this observation by Andreas Baader: “Illegality as the ‘only liberated territory inside metropolises’."

from ESSE - "Of Sabotage in Architecture" Didier Faustino’s Anti-Projects. by Vanessa Morisset

"FIGHT CLUB _ Le stade itinerant"

"Dans cette vidéo, l’artiste Didier Faustino nous présente le processus d’élaboration de sa pièce «Opus Incertum», hommage à la célèbre photographie «Le saut dans le vide» (1960) d’Yves Klein. Surmontée de la phrase «You are invited to try me out» (« vous êtes invités à m’essayer »), cette sculpture participative invite à la fois le spectateur à rejouer l’histoire de l’art mais et aussi à se réapproprier l’œuvre. Architecte de formation, Didier Faustino place le corps au centre de ses projets qui mêlent architecture, art et design. Il interroge ainsi les limites du corps et de l’espace."

from CNAP - Centre National Des Arts Plastiques - Didier Faustino à propos de sa pièce Opus Incertum

"COSMOGONIE" - Hermès International - Photo by David Boureau

Bruno Munari 1944 "Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable armchair" / Bruce McLean 1971 "Plinths I" / Didier Faustino 2009 "Opus Incertum" + "Autos Satisfaction"