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documentary

The Embassy

By All Works, architecture, documentary, modernism

The Embassy project is a semi-fictional semi-documentary series of photographs of an embassy of an Eastern European country of the former COMECON. The photographs were indeed all taken in a real Eastern European unused embassy, however it has been chosen to modify slightly some of them, in order to produce confusion in the viewer’s mind as to wether what he is watching is true or not. The viewer is thus invited in a slightly Kafkaesque journey through empty offices which become more and more claustrophobic and unreal. In a reference to the Cold War diplomatic habits of manipulation, as well as to the former soviet bloc’s use of photomontage, these photographs are seeminlgly documentary, ergo objective, whereas in reality the viewer will never know if what he sees is true or not, truthful or manipulated.

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Hotel Europejski

By All Works, architecture, documentary

The Europejski Hotel is one of Warsaw’s Palace hotels. Built in the 1870s, and left almost untouched by the war, it was nationalised by the communist regime and remained then one of the most prestigious hotels belonging to the Tourism State Company, Orbis. It was only in 2005 that the former owners of the hotel, the Potocki family, were given it back. The hotel currently awaits renovation, since the verdict reprivatising the hotel stated that it could not be used as a hotel until 2008. However, before handing back the hotel to the Potockis, the Orbis Corporation took away all of the furniture and interior decoration it could possibly take. The hotel is thus at the moment an empty shell, with all of its rooms unused.

The Hotel Europejski project is a systematic inventory of the hotel rooms. All of the photographs were framed and shot likewise. In this way, one may easily notice that there are only three variables in the very sober decoration of the rooms: the carpet, the general arrangement of the walls, and the ceiling height. And yet it seems there are countless possible combinations, since although it is difficult to distinguish one room from the other, they are in fact all different.

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Milk Bars

By All Works, architecture, documentary

The «milk bars» are a network of low cost restaurants, spread all over Poland. Created at the end of the 1950s, under socialist Poland, and belonging then to the State Cooperative Spolem, milk bars were largely privatised after 1989, but remain partly state financed today. In this way, milk bars continue to be places where people with little money (students, old age pensioners, but also homeless people) may eat well, at a low cost. Their name comes from the fact that no alcohol is sold at milk bars, and originally, no meat either. Since the beginning of the 2000s, milk bars have received heavy competition from western style fast-food restaurants, and consequently they have started to disappear, one after the other.

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The Oval Offices

By All Works, architecture, collections, documentary

The Oval Offices is a photographic enquiry into the life-size replicas of the office of the President of the United States, the Oval Office. There are over 25 replicas of the Oval Office and the number keeps on growing. Each replica is different: some try to recreate the space of a specific president, while the others are more the embodiment of an idea, than the exact representation of the actual room.

In addition to the images, Grospierre has embarked into an in-depth study of the archaeology of the Oval Office, ranging fro the history of the room, to the symbolics of the oval, and the contemporary use of the room by Hollywood, and whose ultimate goal is to understand the reason for such a proliferation of replicas.

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Hydroklinika

By All Works, architecture, documentary, modernism

The balneological hospital of Druskinnikai in Lithuania, designed by A. and R. Silinskas was built in 1976-81. Having served for merely 20 years, it was shut down and destoyed in 2005, to be replaced by a (probably more) profitable water-amusement park. Hydroklinika is an attempt at documenting the hospital through a global, objective and systematic approach. Therefore, no part of the building, was neglected and all were photographed likewise.

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Daugavpils/Dvinsk/Dyneburg/Borisoglebsk

By All Works, photographic objects, conceptual photography, documentary

I travelled to Daugavpils in October 2012, to photograph the town where Mark Rothko was born, and which he left in 1910, at the age of ten, never to return.

Throughout the duration of my stay in Rothko’s native town, I kept asking myself: “to what extent is photography capable of enlightening a man’s life?”. This interrogation stemmed from the awareness that photography’s ever-growing presence in our visual culture has led us to believe that practically everything might be illustrated or even explained by a single image, that the wealth of the world may be accounted by photography, perhaps even that a photograph may come to replace the written word, the narrative, become self-sufficient.

And while I was walking the streets and alleys of Daugavpils, I came to the conclusion that the enlightening power of photography could actually be quite weak, all the more when thinking of the life of a man as Mark Rothko.

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