April 25, 2018, 10:30 AM – 1:30 PM
Many thanks to the artist Larissa Fassler for her lecture about “WALKING IN PLACE” as part of the international BAI Spring Academy and providing a comprehensive insight for our participants into the evolution and creation of her artistic practice and projects.
“For more than 10 years I have been developing an artistic practice that explores the public spaces of cities and examines their impact on its inhabitants. I am drawn to sites emblematic of countries more generally and am particularly interested in the disconnect between a nation’s ideals or image of itself and the reality on the ground.
Starting in 2005 I focused on public places in Berlin, the city in which I live, focusing on quotidian sites such as transportation hubs and project housing. I then moved on to other familiar cities, but ones in which I did not live, to confront myself with different conceptions of public space: Regent Street in London; Place de la Concorde, Les Halles and recently Gare du Nord in Paris. In 2015 I turned my focus to concepts of public space in non-European cities and created a series of large scale drawings looking at the use and control of space in Taskim Square, Istanbul.
While I use the media of architectural representation such as models and plans to reflect these places, my work differs fundamentally from conventions, forms of documentation, and methods used by architects and urban planners. I make large map-drawing hybrids as well as objects that exist somewhere between models and sculptures. I employ my own subjective systems to survey public spaces by walking their edges, counting my steps, recording my corporeal experience and spending hundreds of hours collecting detailed observations. I feel that there is knowledge that comes from ‘deep’ looking, where assumptions and preconceptions about a place and its inhabitants can be corrected by accurate, often minute, individual and personal observations. Observing, describing, and naming are for me strategies to make different realities visible.” (Larissa Fassler)
Larissa Fassler (b. Vancouver 1975) has lived and worked in Berlin since 1999. She obtained her BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, and an MFA from Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. In 2017 her work was shown at the 11th São Paulo Architecture Biennial and at the MAAT | Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon. In 2016 her work was exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris; at Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris; at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt and at the Esker Foundation in Calgary. Critical reviews and writing on her work have appeared in Canadian Art, Artforum and Artpress and her work has been included in books such as Imagine Architecture and Beyond Architecture from Gestalten and Dirt by PennDesign and the MIT Press.
More information on the LARISSA FASSLER Website.
