The irony of modernist living utopias

This self-published volume presents on 28 pages one photo each of extremely worn-out pieces of furniture ─ some of them with improvised repairs ─ from Chandigarh. Most of them were designed by Le Corbusier, who conceived the planned Indian city in the 1950s, but for some of the pieces the attribution seems questionable. This illustrates the irony with which the legacy of modernist residential and living utopias is presented here. The furniture pieces appear extremely isolated from their context, even when they are partly obscured by other objects in front of them. As there are no captions or explanations, much room is left for interpretation: Is the publication criticizing the Western market for second-hand designer furniture, for which Chandigarh is a cheap source? Or is the book itself exploiting the paradoxical gesture of placing an aesthetic of poverty in a contemporary design context? Its material quality also has an ambivalent effect: on the one hand, the volume consists of handmade Indian paper; on the other, the furniture is given a fresh splendour through the use of a special printing process with varnish realized in Switzerland. The cover, also printed and laminated in Switzerland, was conceived by a designer in India.

Awarded by the “Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2014”.

An electronic world of pleasure, frustration and sadness

Lace Curtain is exploring an electronic world of pleasure, frustration and sadness. Bedroom dancers, synthetic singers, basement kicks in a romantic void. Influenced by the Germans, the Italians, pale British button pushers, glamorous alien pop futurists, Mid-Western sweat, NYC disco dreamers, undercover kings and queens escaping a dull grey world with rhythm and noise, sound and vision.

A snapshot of emerging artistic practices – drifting identity

Between 2012 and 2015, Maximage designs Les Urbaines’ evolving identity as a laboratory for experimentations with different means of production generating new aesthetics. Les Urbaines festival takes place each year for a week-end dedicated to emerging artistic practices, with some forty-odd projects happening free of charge between Lausanne and Renens.

FUZI Flash Tattoo Collection captures the bizarre world of the French graffiti artist turned tattooist across 145 pages of original drawings. Hilarious and mildly disturbing in equal measure.
A white cover collector version of the book was printed using a spirit duplicator and carbon paper, commonly used by tattooist to transfer tattoo on the skin. Printed in 50 copies this edition is numbered and sign by the artist.

An archive of vandalism

This book is a collection of photographs created between 1996 and 2001, an archive of vandalism, a contemporary document of “brutal insouciance” accompanied by the artist’s poems and texts. It wasn’t just about slamming, hammering and smearing one’s name everywhere to become known, it was about leaving behind a trace, both in the space and in the heads of the passengers.
This required a rigid approach: employing the surveillance methods of the rail police (SUGE) and conductors, only with reverse circumstances. A routine that was synchronized with the gaps in train schedules and intervals between security checks; rhythmized by station stops and coach compartments; locating, painting over and photographing—maintaining the line. Within the rules and regulations of society, they created Temporary Autonomous Zones for themselves, in which they could briefly experience absolute freedom, expressed through an archaic “aestheticism of chaos.”