Pelin Tan Curates Retrospective of Architect Didier F. Faustino at MAAT Museum

EXIST/RESIST is the first institutional exhibition that analyzes almost thirty years of practice by Didier Fiúza Faustino (b. 1968), the Franco-Portuguese experimentalist whose work has systematically provoked and transgressed the formal and conceptual demarcations between architecture, design and art. .

Basing its title on two separate pieces ( Exist , 2016; Resist , 2017), the exhibition reveals a driving tension present in all of Faustino’s creative explorations and its continued resonance in the face of the aggravating conditions of physical and mental survival in today’s world. . Whether in the form of installations, films, sculptures, editorial projects, temporary architecture or built work, the “body” emerges as a recurring trope and a measure of individuation and, thus, as an economic and political site of dispute.

The exhibition, curated by Pelin Tan , brings together for the first time a vast selection of works, preparatory materials and prototypes – drawings, photos, models, large-scale installations, films and objects, revolving around four central strands of research that repeated in Faustino’s work: Housing and Accommodation, Borders of Bodies, Design as Resistance, Agonism in Public Space. This exhibition includes old and newly created pieces, loans from international collections and never-before-seen documentation from the artist-architect’s private archive, takes place in a scenography designed by Faustino’s studio – Mésarchitecture  –, and was conceptually conceived to bring two areas into dialogue. of the museum and, thus, create two distinct spatial experiences.

In the iconic oval gallery, the large-scale structure that rises in the middle is an analogue data center, an inverted panoptic white room and a temporary autonomous zone presented as an ex nihilo of the artist-architect’s studio, which houses the central body of the works featured in this retrospective of the middle phase of his career.

Next to this structure is the recently created installation Democracia Portátil (2016–2022), a radical proposal that invites the public to face the possibilities and impossibilities of being public, and which will be the stage for a series of events, presentations and performances. throughout the duration of the show.

The second room, in turn, is designed as a performative space for the public to engage with Faustino’s artistic and design thinking. Visitors are presented with a spatial and sensorial environment of disaggregated formations, a labyrinth built by the integration of reedited pieces.

As part of this unprecedented exhibition and as a manifesto, a new book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in two separate editions in French and English. Architecture for Disquiet Bodies , edited by Christophe Le Gac, offers a comprehensive look at over 25 years of unique creations. Participants include Marie-Hélène Fabre, Christophe Le Gac, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pelin Tan, Troy Conrad Therrien.

The exhibition includes loans from: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Frac Center – Val de Loire, Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels, Filomena Soares Gallery, Yves Klein Archive and Center Pompidou, Paris.

The exhibition runs October 5, 2022–March 6, 2023.

A conversation with curator Pelin Tan can be found here.