Jean-Pascal Flavien — Portfolio — Slash Paris

Ballardian House creates a concrete setting, while evoking an entire fictional universe. Dissolving demarcation between mental space, built structure and surrounding landscape, Jean-Pascal Flavien’s house draws on the writings of J.G. Ballard whose highly charged dystopian scenarios often displace psychological and existential conditions onto buildings and landscapes. The house will include custom-made furnishings, specific to its premise, drawing both on Jean-Pascal Flavien’s formal vocabulary and on a condensed Ballardian world. New sculptural works inside the building will also draw on texts: represented by conglomerates of citations from Ballard’s writing, these works are neither real nor abstract but exist at once in multiple fictional locations and realities—as if the words were bringing to completion what is not physically present. In addition, the landscape outside the house will include a pair of entangled chairs that echo the house’s act of doubling yet also invoke the presence of inhabitants, just as doubling rows of small boulders recall an archaic meeting place but also incorporates an instance of mirroring. The sculptures can appear to shift between states: at times present as discrete objects, at others fusing more resolutely chameleon-like into the fantastic landscape Ballardian House conjures up.

Source Esther Schipper

Six houses have been made; viewer in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, no drama house in Berlin in 2009, two persons house in São Paulo in 2010, breathing house in Pougues-les Eaux in 2012, statement house in London and folding house in Monaco in 2016.

Each houses proposes a specific perspective on the act of occupied a space, proposing different types of interaction with language, space, gesture, or even the documentation of the activities that take place within it. In each case, the architectural project speaks by way of companion pieces and articulates its premise by way of its movement into other media, other modes of communication.

Source Catherine Bastide