Architecture is frozen music

Laure Catugier

March 3 - May 7, 2022 

Opening: Thurs, March 3, 18 - 22 hr 
Book launch with Naima Editions
Sound performance with Marie Takahashi
Artist Talk: Sat, April 2, 15 - 16 hr 

*Exhibition Review: Kolumne: Architecture is frozen music – Eine Ausstellung von Laure Catugier - Kunstleben Berlin - das Kunstmagazin (DE)

*Funded by Bezirksamt Pankow/ Amt für Weiterbildung und Kultur, Fachbereich Kunst und Kultur. 

In parallel to the Berlin festival MaerzMusik, Laure Catugier is invited by the gallery einBuch.haus to present her first monograph entitled Architecture is Frozen Music, gathering her artistic work of the last ten years. Presented in the form of an e-book (digital book) accompanied by a limited edition book object, this editorial project is a collaboration with Naima Editions (Paris/Berlin).

On this occasion the artist presents the long-term project Architecture is frozen music, a series of videos made during artistic residencies in Egypt, Czech Republic, Iran, Japan, Russia and Poland. Each video is built from photographs taken in their respective places, questioning the architectural forms of modernism. They are accompanied by a soundtrack elaborated most of the time in partnership with local sound artists. Moreover, one of them with whom Laure Catugier is used to working, the Japanese violinist Marie Takahashi, will perform a sound improvisation on the evening of the opening. The exhibition will also host images from the films in a variety of sizes and media (wood, blue back paper, aluminum dibond).

einBuch # 22

Architecture is frozen music
Laure Catugier
einBuch.haus & Naima Editions, 2022 

Artist Book 2nd edition
Folded object in a box with the embossed title
Concept, graphic design and image credit: Laure Catugier
Indigo Print by AusDruck / Binding: Julia Fabricius, Buchbinderei Klünder
Signed and numbered second edition of 30 + 3 AP
2nd edition released on September 9, 2022 at MAD7

E-BOOK
Publishing house: Naima Editions, 2022
Edited by Naima Editions, Agathe Lacroix, Manon Piel, Laure Catugier
Graphic Design: Maycec
Text contribution: Livia Tarsia In Curia, Elise Girardot, Natasha Chuk
EPUB; English
ISBN : 978-2-37440-115-7
Translation: Claudio Cambon / Proofreading: Gareth Davies

This first monograph by Laure Catugier explores the study she has been conducting for years on the spread of modern architectural standards on an international scale. It is a hybrid publication: a digital book (EPUB), containing critical texts and travel diaries (sound and visual), and a printed, folded book object.
The title Architecture is frozen music evokes the idea of a partition, a staff where the lines indicate the pitch of the sound. The structure of the book is freely inspired by ‘Lines: A Brief History’ (Routledge, 2016) in which the anthropologist Tim Ingold develops the idea that "a study of men and things is a study of the lines of which they are made". Walking, writing or creating is, according to him, part of a "factory of lines".

In concrete terms, the book will include an analysis of the work through critical texts, visual and sound diaries. These "travel" or "residence" notebooks will present visual, sound and dreamlike motifs along straight, curved and broken lines. The collection of forms, materials, colors and volumes built up over the years by the artist will be associated with the stories and sketches that accompanied their genesis. The idea is to propose several paths through the whole composition, and thus to make us feel the correspondences, the ineptitudes, the movement that inhabits these forms, between equivocal symbols and banal everyday objects. The artist's book completes an aspect that the e-book cannot satisfy: the spatial experience. Indeed, in this work, playing with visual perception is a fundamental aspect, and it only works if you move in space.

The book object is built on the "Open Form" theory of the Polish modernist architect Oskar Hansen. The issue here is to avoid any hierarchy, which is why there is neither beginning nor end, nor reading direction: the usual order of the book is reversed. Inside a folded cardboard cover, the pages overlap, creating threads through the crossing and superimposition of lines. The vision is thus disturbed by unexpected "collages".

Laure Catugier (1982, Toulouse, France)

lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the École d’Architecture de Toulouse and the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse. As an artist with a background in architecture, Catugier's work conveys the geometric language of modernism. Through diverse media such as photography, video or performance, she questions the perception and representation of spatiality. She examines the functionality of modernist architecture and urban spaces and researchs on the global standardisation of construction.

Since 2015, she has obtained several residency grants in Germany, Austria, Japan, Iran, Czech Republic, Russia, Egypt, Bolivia and Taiwan. She is the winner of the International Celeste Prize, as well as scholarships from the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt Berlin, the Pilecki Institute Warsaw and the Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn. In 2021, she was the winner of a public art installation in a future subway station in Toulouse.

Her work has been exhibited internationally (selection) :
Total Museum (Seoul); In Sonora Festival (Madrid); Artum Foundation (Warsaw), Centraltrack Gallery (Dallas, US); Galerie Weisser Elefant, German-Japanese Cultural Center and Korean Cultural Center (Berlin); Institut Français (Düsseldorf); Jeune Création at the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac and Voltaire Mécénat Emerige (Paris); OXO Tower (London); Festival des Artes Binnar (Porto) and Arte Fiera Bologna.

laurecatugier.com

PRESS RELEASE