“Contexts”. Exhibition at the French Pavilion. 2002

Site: French Pavilion, Venice

Client: French Ministry of Culture

Size: 3200mm x 1200mm

Cost: € 15,000

Design Team : David Serero & Elena Fernandez | ITERAE + Arnaud Descombes & Antoine Regnault | DZO

“…It is easier to create a digital model of verbal knowledge (like «teaching» a machine to play chess, for example) than to model a savoir-faire or making, a technique of manual elaboration that implies irregularity, hesitation, trial and error, internal logics of compensation, in an attempt to keep the surface as a whole together. The technique of braiding evokes this kind of complexity where the hands interact with the form in each of the knots. It points to the power and product of a transformative intelligence, which is a mental and material process shared by any kind of technique. The art of braiding, knotting, twisting and curling motifs, the oscillation of the thread around the fabric generate an incessant inversed and reversed figure as they are dreams of spaces without seams, where the weave looses in its density of the surface the linearity of its contour. Like a carpet covered with ornamental patterns, the woven surface uses a simple movement, which repetition and recurrence proceed by gradual complication in time and in space.

Architecture begins with and in ornament, or rather, in the woven mat; not with its capacity to provide shelter or put up an enclosure, but with its actual fibrous quality. The interior is not defined by a continuous enclosure of walls but by the folds, twists, and turns in an often-discontinuous ornamental surface. The ornamental destiny of the twisted surface begins the process of superposition of form and structure. Ornament emerges within structure…”