Open House
Geneva
2022

Angela Luna
Alex Shirley-Smith
Andreas Kressig
Anupama Kundoo
Andrea Zittel
Atelier Van Lieshout
Bettershelter
Carla Juaçaba
CICR
Cattelan & Parreno
Didier Fuiza Faustino
Eduard Böhtlingk
Fabrice Gygi
Fiona Meadows
Freeform
Frida Escobedo
Gramazio/Kohler
Joëlle Allet
John Armleder
Ken Isaacs
Kerim Seiler
Lang/Baumann
Matti Suuronen
Monica Ursina Jäger
N55
Annexe Zürich
Rahbaran Hürzeler Architects
RELAX
Shelterprojects
Una Szeemann
Van Bo Le Mentzel

statement 

Open House was a series of exhibitions and events conceived and directed by Simon Lamunière and presenting innovative and original forms of habitat through projects in the fields of art, architecture, design and humanitarian aid.

It took place in four phases between May 2021 and August 2022. The last and most important of these events brought together 35 projects and pavilions in Geneva’s Parc Lullin during the summer of 2022.

The main aim of the exhibition was to broaden thinking about the concept of habitat. The programme focused on radical and original innovations in architecture, art, design and humanitarian issues.

It also stimulated reflection on migration policy issues, highlighting how mobility issues are redefining living spaces and requiring far-reaching revisions to our concepts of habitat and solidarity, taking account of environmental and social challenges.

Lang/Baumann

Atelier Van Lieshout

Frida Escobedo

Ken Isaacs

Matti Suuronen

Kerim Seiler

Rahbaran Hürzeler Architects

Didier Fuiza Faustino

Eduard Böhtlingk

AIGARS LAUZIS (STUDIO ZELTINI)

Angela Luna

Alex

Shirley-Smith

Andreas Kressig

Anupama Kundoo

Andrea Zittel

Bettershelter

Carla Juaçaba

CICR

Cattelan & Parreno

Fabrice Gygi

Freeform

Gramazio/

Kohler

Joëlle Allet

John Armleder

Monica Ursina Jäger

N55

Nice&Wise

Annexe Zürich

RELAX

Una Szeemann

Van Bo Le Mentzel

FESTIVAL
LES URBAINES
LAUSANNNE
2011

Adrian Lohmüller
Adrien Missika
Andrei Ujica
Athene Galiciadis
Aurélien Froment
Aurélien Gamboni
Baptiste Gaillard
Emre Hüner
Florian Graf
Gordon Matta Clark
Kara Uzelman
Monya Pletsch
Nicola Martini
Vittorio Cavallini
Attila Faravelli
Raphaël Julliard
Riccardo Arena
Stefan Burger
Yves Mettler

underground connections

A PROJECT CURATED BY PATRICK GOSATTI & NOAH STOLZ

A network of underground connections is being woven between the various artistic interventions in this edition. This image has become the theme of the exhibition’s programme. Its origins lie in an intuition suggested by the city’s unique topography: that of a disappearance, in this case of the Flon and Louve rivers. A study of this history reveals the paradoxes of a faltering urbanism. Today, the city’s planning and development have resulted in an incongruous stratification that makes it difficult to see the bigger picture.
 This exhibition aims to reveal a flow of subterranean imaginations to be allowed to surface.

Yves Mettler, for example, is creating a ghostly structure on the Place de la Riponne, a 1:1 reconstruction of an oil drilling derrick built in 1929 in Arnex sur Orbe. Nearby, in the rooms of the Espace Arlaud, a sort of headquarters brings together heterogeneous theses and attitudes to the stratification of historical flows.

There are documents relating to local town planning and objects evocative of parallel, subterranean histories, such as a 1912 bottle of Swiss oil borrowed from the Geology Museum. These objects mingle with the artistic interventions: research into the highly unusual attack tactics adopted by the Israeli army and inspired by the theories of Deleuze and Guattari (Monya Pletsch), theorising a society structured around the Maelström (Aurélien Gamboni), the construction of a mythology around the discovery of antimatter (Kara Uzelman), or Adrian Lohmüller’s Water Portraits, liquid relics of clothes cleaned using a water filtration system reconstructed by the artist.

Our approach was therefore inspired by archaeology. We asked the artists to appropriate and reveal this idea of stratification. Our intention was not to deconstruct or criticise the urban planning of the city of Lausanne, but to adopt an attitude of questioning by digging up new hypotheses and piercing the surface of the visible with a transversal gaze. In the secret basements of La Riponne, multiple imaginary worlds come together, where the flow of oil meets the flow of rivers, where the histories intertwined in the strata of the city converge in a single place, a place that ultimately belongs only to our imagination.