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photomontage

Kolorobloki

By All Works, architecture, modernism, photomontage

Emalite glass is a synthetic opaque and multicoloured glass that appeared in the 1950s. Inserted in aluminium frames, it is used to cover the facades of buildings with modular panels of any requested colour. Its simplicity of use as well as its modularity account for its popularity in the 60s and 70s in Western Europe and in the countries of the socialist bloc. However, emalite glass does not age well, and is often replaced by other covering material, not as colourful.

Kolorobloki comprises a series of photographs of emalite glass covered buildings. These photographs are composed in a modular way, i.e. using the modularity of the emalite glass panels as they are used as a construction material. Thus, although all the buildings are, in real life, different, their photographs have been manipulated so that their facades have all the same proportions and the same number of floors. Some buildings have been shortened, while others have been enlarged, by adding the required number of modular panels. The only unaltered motif in these photographs is the colour of the façade. From a certain perspective, emalite glass panels are one of the last heirs of the modernist tradition in architecture, where simplicity and functionality are cardinal values. Modularity, from this point of view, is one architectural feature best suited to building something functional and cheap, but also maybe elegant. Nevertheless, as far as emalite glass is concerned, given the poor quality of the materials used, one often faces a kind of degenerate modernism.

However, Kolorobloki is not a criticism of modernism in architecture, on the contrary. It is a project that uses the grammar of modernism to show its limitations, but with a great dose of sympathy for that architecture as well as for the buildings photographed

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The House which grows

By All Works, anthropocene, architectural fantasies, photomontage

However, these houses very often also continue to expand. After a few years of use, the need for additional space occurs, and the owners decide then to enlarge their homes. This enlargement is implemented in the same fashion as the original construction: the house is nearly-finished, but the façade remains bare. And this process may happen several times.

The House Which Growsis a photographic series which is inspired by this phenomenon, but also exaggerates it. The first image shows a nearly finished house, which, in the subsequent images, appears to be growing, with the addition of new wings, walls, and even turrets to the original building. Eventually, in the last image, the house has become a huge chaotic and shapeless construction. The series is open-ended: although six images were originally created, there is always the possibility of placing additional walls to the façade, so that the house can be, literally, ever-growing.

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Kunstkamera

By All Works, collections, conceptual photography, mise-en-abyme, photomontage

Kunstkamera is a photographic installation consisting in an imaginary collection of photographs, shown in an especially designed hexagonal room, and creating a visual and intellectual game for the viewer.The title, Kunstkamera, refers on the one hand to the “Wunderkammer” and “Kunstkammer” of the Renaissance: cabinets of curiosities and art, typologies of extraordinary exhibits aiming at showing the world in miniature. On the other hand, the Kunstkammers were also paintings representing these very cabinets, where the painter would include hidden meanings only readable by the initiated. The Kunstkamera installation contains both the collection of curiosities, in the form of various photographs, and the photograph representing the collection, thus creating a mise en abyme, with the photograph of the collection inside the collection, which is itself represented in a photograph, and so on. Practically, the installation consists of a hexagonal room, with two entrances opposite each other. The room is thus divided in two: the photographs are symmetrically organised with respect the line created by the two entrances.

Each half room contains two side walls, on which are hanging the photographs of the collection, and a central wall displaying the image representing the room itself. The game begins when the viewer gets acquainted with the photographs, the way they are organised on the walls, and what they represent. As in the “kunstkammer” of old, this one contains all sorts of visual and narrative riddles. The topics of the photographs are the keys to these riddles. On the one hand they refer to tradition of the “kunstkammer”, the very fact of collecting, and the narcissistic obsessions related to it. On the other hand, they refer to my own private obsessions as a photographer: my tendency to create symmetries and repetitions, and to use a creative instrument which I felt prisoner of, which is the idea of series in photography.

The very fact of taking pictures in series is a form of collecting and also an obsession, and Kunstkamera is an attempt to embody this idea of series in photography, and ultimately exceed it. That is the reason why the central photograph representing the collection shows different images than those physically hanging on the walls: these are all series whose subsequent images appear only in the mise en abyme of the central photograph. A final and invisible motif consists in that most of the photographs are hoaxes, either visual (what they show is impossible) or narrative (the description I give them is false). Mystification, through digital manipulation, has indeed become an integral part of photography today, and it seemed necessary to me to include some in Kunstkamera, as ultimate riddles for the viewer to discover.

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The Bank

By All Works, catoptric chests, conceptual photography, photomontage

The Bank is a photographic installation which plays with the idea of the financial institution, where the bank stands as a metaphor of wealth, and more generally, all material things.

The Bank’s key driving ideas are the following : on the one hand, that one is always drawn to what is hidden and concealed, and that one always wants to discover what is behind closed doors. And on the other hand, that apperances may be deceiving.

Practically, the installation consists of series of photographs and of photographic objects which are designed to tickle the viewer’s curiosity and try to discover what is hidden behind the innumerable doors of the Bank.

Formally, the Bank is organised on three sets of elements. First, the viewer is confronted with photographs of deserted and disused New York banks interiors. Second, the viewer enters the vault, which is made out of 10 life size photographs of safe deposit boxes. There are approximately 2000 safe desposit boxes represented in this vault, each one with a number. The numbering of the safe deposit boxes hide a secret message, invisible at first sight, that the viewer is invited to decipher. Third, and finally,the viewer is confronted with the Safe, at the core of the installation. It is a photographic object representing a life size bank safe, whose doors may be openened.

Metaphorically, the Bank is an attempt at tackling the finiteness and illusory character of all material things. Once all doors have been opened, the viewer may well realise that there really is nothing to be found.

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K-Pool i Spółka

By All Works, architectural fantasies, modernism, photomontage

Rem Koolhas, in Delirious New York, ends his book by an imaginary tale about Russian avant-guarde architects, who escaped the Soviet Union to reach New York. The decision to escape the USSR was made in the 1930’s, and the means of transportation was a floating swimming pool, which, when all the architects were swimming synchronically, would move in the opposite direction. Thus, swimming towards Moscow, they only reached Manhattan in the mid-1970’s. Unfortunately for them, the Manhattan of the 70’s had little to do from what they had dreamed of at the onset of their journey.
It is this moving, wonderful and absurd endeavor that inspired me to create K-Pool. K-Pool stands for Koscisuko Pool, an open air swimming pool in Brooklyn, NY (built in 1958-60 by Morris Lapidus), whose intricate design and incredible shapes I used to re-create Rem Koolhas’ vision.

K-Pool i Spółka (which could be translated as “K-Pool and company”), juxtaposes this imaginary swimming pool with real achievements of Soviet Union architects, the very colleagues of those who decided to flee the USSR. While these were swimming, back home, they were erecting astonishing buildings. But also swimming pools, which now, for the majority of them, rest unused, as a final irony to this visual journey.

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Paper Planes

By All Works, architecture, conceptual photography, photomontage

The exhibition’s starting point was the Polish Aviation in Cracow, designed in 2010 by the Berlin architect Justus Pysall, in partnership with ARUP. Paper Planes was inspired by this building, and is an interpretation of it, its origin, its function and its form. The work was initiated with the acknowledgment that a) the building was designed as if it was made as an origami, a paper cut-out from a square area, and b) that the end result is a shape that looks at the same time like a gigantic aircraft propeller or a flying wing, both shapes associated with the idea of flight. Grospierre’s process in this exhibition was two-fold. First, it consisted of photographing all the actual building’s surfaces (concrete walls, rooftop, windows and floors) to “recreate” the original square out of which the building was cut-out. It is thus the reverse track that led to the actual building: going from the real material and photographing it to produce the original square that was used to create the museum’s design. Second, using the obtained square as an imaginary piece of paper, printing this square on photographic paper and creating real paper planes out of it. The end result of the work consisted of 2 sets of photographs and photographic objects:

1) photographs of the museum, showing its transformation from an architectural design into the original square

2) 5 different paper airplanes, all made out of the double-sided photograph which represents the flattened out building.

In addition, viewers were invited to create their own paper plane, made from the flattened out building printed on regular-sized sheets of paper. Throughout the show, which lasted from March to July 2011 at the Phase 2 exhibition space in the ARUP Headquarters in London, more than 800 miniature paper planes were created.

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W–70

By All Works, architectural fantasies, photomontage

The context of the W-70 project was the Concrete Legacy exhibition at the CCA in Warsaw in June 2007, which “focused on concrete block housing as one of the gravest consequences of Modernist architectural thought”, and its embodiment in Poland. The W-70 system was the most popular prefabricated multi-storey home system in Poland during the 1970s.

The firststep of the W-70 project consisted in photographying approximately 4000 pictures of different elements of this system, in order to be able to re-assemble them later according to one’s will. Using the photographed prefabricated modules as “raw material”, the second step of the W-70 project consisted in creating visual and spatial situations where the viewer could appreciate the concrete block houses from different perspectives (litterally and metaphotically).

I have indeed been fascinated for long years by concrete block houses and in this project I wanted to convey this fascination, either using some visual properties of perspective (as a reference to the tradition which lead to the Modernist school of architecture), or confronted the viewer with unusual architectural situation. In this way, I tried to achieve pieces that would amuse and intrigue the viewer, and maybe make him look at the modern block houses differently.

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Axonometry

By All Works, architectural fantasies, photomontage

Axonometry is a loose set of photographic works whose common denominator is the fact that they all represent reality as an axonometric view. This is an apparent paradox: one sees reality in perspective (and this is what the camera records), and axonometry is a technique representing reality in an abstract, geometric fashion, which by definition contradicts the fundamental rules of perspective. In other words, the expression “axonometric photography” is a contradiction in terms, since photography is always a representation through perspective.

This visual paradox has intrigued me for some time, and I have over the years created several axonometric photographs, most of the times visualisations of buildings (as axonometry is very often used in architectural designs), but also of objects. These images were ether parts of larger projects, or self-sufficient works. The quasi geometric aspect of these photographs, but also the need to build these images literally from scratch, has led me to represent imaginary buildings, legends of the modernist tradition.

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