Joséphine and Margaux

It was during their studies in architecture that Josephine Larere and Margaux Bitton have developed a common interest in architecture at its limits with art, in political and specific current contexts. From their reflections on the potentials and strengths of space, a structure or a material, they created in September 2016 the ONE Project that they launched in January 2017 in South America.

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Concept

The concept is simple, ONE creates collaborations with South American artists and architects. Each collaboration creates a pavilion built by them, in a given time, and above all - and this is the singularity of the project - made of a single material.

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ONE Artist - ONE Material - ONE Pavilion - ONE exhibition - One Publication

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Funding

Funded by crowdfunding, the ONE Project has established itself for a month and a half in each of the three South American cities, chosen for their artistic growth, and representative of a local culture. 

Buenos Aires (Argentina) - Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) - Medellin (Colombia)

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Pavilion

The term pavilion is broad - spatial experience, work, object, structure, performance, ephemeral - and voluntarily leaves a great freedom of interpretation. Each artist has a personal definition, applied to the project and derived from his creative universe. «If the term pavilion can have many interpretations, we ask each collaborator to write its own definition. It’s a way to integrate everyone’s creative universe into the projects.»

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Challenge

This freedom is found in the major challenge of the project, the work of the unique material, which imposes a plastic experimentation that goes beyond the limits of it. Its conventional use, its properties, its appearance, its aesthetics are diverted, sometimes totally inverted.

Added to this are time and budget, factors which have also played a major role in the exercise of style proposed by the two young architects. The time allotted for each construction - two to four weeks - includes both meeting with the artist, project design, material supply, construction and installation. Concerning the budget - 200 euros per pavilion - it is a major factor, imposing to be inventive and original on the choice of material, involving questions of recycling, crafts and local materials. This has a major impact on the pavilion design, including its dimensions.

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Result

Of the three planned collaborations, six will finally be born. From colorful wool yarn to recycled plastic bags, through brick and liana, each pavilion is a new adventure. By choosing the unique material, made by the artist, and for which Joséphine and Margaux kept the rule of never intervening, the history and the creative universe of the artist settled down. During the creation phase, the universes merge and the multicultural encounter is created. For each phase of construction, the process is always different. Once being done without the collaborator; another around a workshop with students in architecture; or through the participation of volunteers, and even by themselves becoming the architects of their last pavilion.

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Exhibition

If ONE Project is an adventure, an experience initiated by these two young architects in search of professional meetings and concrete projects, it is also and above all a desire for discovery, exchange and artistic sharing with different cultures. And they will share it with you from 22 to 24 September 2017, during an exhibition they set up at the Opus Certum architecture Studio in Paris. Photos, videos, models and two of the pavilions will be exhibited.

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