WE WANT TO LOOK UP AT THE SUN, BUT COULD THE SUN BE LOOKING DOWN ON US? by Olivier Goethals and Rudy Guedj
with a small exhibition + a *shop music* playlist bringing moon, black holes and other celestial bodies together for a cosmic book browsing experience
Thursday April 8, 1pm
“On the black background of my phone, set in dark mode, the three white dots were like three neighbouring stars in space. I regretted adding them, afraid that the punctuation made me sound too cheesy. Very quickly, three other dots appeared on the left side of the chat, your side, animated from left to right, suggesting your typing and hesitation, leaving me suspended in time.”
‘We want to look up at the Sun, but could the Sun be looking down on us?’ is a hybrid translation of the work created for, as well as from the designs of the exhibition ‘I See That I See What You Don’t See’ (the dutch contribution to the XXII Triennale di Milano in 2019). ‘I See That I See What You Don’t See’ presented a layered, multidimensional image of the relationship that humans, animals, and landscapes maintain with darkness. The scenography of the show was the result of a collaboration between architect Olivier Goethals and graphic designer Rudy Guedj.
Rather than using a book as the lifeless documentation of a space that doesn’t exist anymore, the designers suggest some kind of timeline to trace back their methodology and give an insight into their respective practices. Displaying sketchbooks, notes, floor plans, visual and textual translation of the material they created before, during, and after the exhibition design process, the book highlights the serendipitous discoveries that can happen during collaboration.
A limited edition of prints and a video work will be shown for the occasion.
‘We want to look up at the Sun, but could the Sun’ be looking down on us? is the fifth book published by Building Fictions.
Building Fictions (BF) is a publishing project that sets out to explore ‘building’ as a methodology, with the intent to highlight the potential of storytelling within practices at the intersection of art, design, architecture, literature. Not limited by the first definition of a building as a space, BF is interested in collaboration as an assembling, layering process. The projects published often are the result of collaborative work from which emerge questions on the established relation between text and image as autonomous yet related languages. While investigating fictional strategies and their potential within artistic production, BF wants to find out where those strategies are at play in the context of real constructions, could those be made of concrete or be more ephemeral, metaphorical, thus anchoring the effects of fictions within the real world.
