Image Credit and Courtesy: Céline Brunko, Simona Ferrari, and Philipp Fleischmann.
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to announce Final Projects: Group LIII, exhibiting three works produced by our Artists and Architects-in-Residence, Simona Ferrari, Céline Brunko, and Philipp Fleischmann. Final Projects: Group LIII marks the culmination of the 53rd iteration of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments.
Artists
Céline Brunko
“The creek, like every component of all the river systems across the city from mountains to ocean, had not been left to nature. Its banks were concrete. Its bed was concrete. When boulders were running there, they sounded like a rolling freight.”
—John McPhee from “Los Angeles Against the Mountains—I”
When a city is built, an alienation of materials takes place. Natural materials are sourced, extracted, transformed, transported, and reconceived into a new urban form. In Los Angeles, this can predominantly be seen through the history and industry of the nearby city of Irwindale (known as the “Jardin de Roca”), at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, where the San Gabriel River and its debris flows. Geographically, the city consists primarily of rock quarries and has relatively few residents, but Irwindale plays an immense role in the history of Los Angeles.
Through experience based sound, video, and photo installation, Céline Brunko retraces the steps of material extraction from the result of Los Angeles, to the source in Irwindale, giving viewers an inside look at the natural and industrial landscape that built the city. With microphones attached to Brunko’s hands and listening to the amplified touch through the headphones, she explores the hidden layers of the landscape and the materials. By turning away from an anthropocentric viewer and listening position, Brunko addresses the act of careful listening to non-human and more-than-human beings.
The opening reception will feature a performance titled “sounding the stones,” by Brunko in collaboration with Gregory Tara Hari.
Céline Brunko is an artist and videographer from Zurich, Switzerland who studied Photography at the Zurich University of the Arts, and Fine Arts at the University of Art and Design FHNW Basel. Since 2021, she has been teaching at the Lucerne School of Art & Design for the Art & Mediation program. Previously, she worked for the Fotomuseum Winterthur and curated the artist-run space Reaktor in Zurich.
Her video, audio, and object based works are primarily focused on topics as land use, mining, and new materiality. In her work she uses speculative narratives as a method to create a possible future scenario. Her works have been presented, among others, at the Kunsthalle Winterthur, CH; Haus Konstruktiv, CH; Helmhaus Zürich, CH; Photoforum PasquArt, Biel, CH; Schaulager, Basel, CH; Kunsthaus Baselland, CH; Kunstraum Kreuzlingen, CH; Heiligenkreuzerhof, Wien, AT; «re|vision» European Experimental Film Festival at MIT, Cambridge, MA/US; Fondazione Fotografia Modena, IT. Besides her exhibition practice, she is part of an architectural research project in Chisinau, Moldova since 2016 and had the chance to work on an interdisciplinary project at the University of Toronto.
Simona Ferrari
“[...] that it must be / Still more like Los Angeles.”
—Bertolt Brecht from “On Thinking about Hell”
Living in exile in Los Angeles, Bertolt Brecht’s poetry maps his new physical surroundings as well as his emigrant experience. Using Brecht’s garden poems written during this time as an entry point to the city, Simona Ferrari’s “Garden in Progress” is the culmination of a body of research that presents gardens as a lens for navigating Los Angeles. As omnipresent interstices of the city’s urban texture, gardens are highlighted as sites of resistance where multiple entanglements between ecology, economy, politics, and ownership emerge, suggesting alternative spatial and social narratives. For “Garden in Progress,” Ferrari turns these experiences into large scale drawings situated across the Mackey Apartments’ site, translating her journey across the city to the scale of the exhibition. With their environmental scale, the drawings transport viewers across the many microhistories of these sites while also functioning as site-specific architectural interventions that dialogue with the site.
An off-site reading of Brecht’s garden poetry will take place on Sunday, September 03, at 6:00 PM at David Horvitz’s Garden, 1911 7th Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90018, as part of “Language Garden” programmed by Corina Copp, Sophia Le Fraga, and Joseph Mosconi.
Simona Ferrari is an architect currently living and working in Zurich. She studied at the Polytechnic University of Milan and the Technical University of Vienna and received her Master of Architecture from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where she was a recipient of the Monbukagakusho Scholarship. She completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. Moving across scales and formats, her practice addresses architecture and the built environment through project-making, photography, drawing, and writing.
Recent works include “Landscape In-Between,” a project for the former industrial site of Acetati in Verbania, Italy, awarded by the 15th edition of the Europan architectural competition. Since 2017 Simona has been teaching and researching at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, Chair of Architectural Behaviorology, and was assistant curator of the Japan Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. Previously, she worked with the Tokyo-based architecture studio Atelier Bow-Wow, where she completed several international projects, including the Search Library in Muharraq, Bahrain, an installation for the Chicago Architecture Biennial at the Chicago Cultural Center, and the design of the Japanese House exhibition held at the MAXXI Museum in Rome and MOMAT in Tokyo.
Philipp Fleischmann
There is an inherent hierarchy built into the process of taking a photo with a camera. When a person is behind the camera, a bias is formed. For Philipp Fleischmann, the question becomes, “How is it possible to formulate queer sensibilities while avoiding clear, traditional and highly problematic modes of representation?” His project at the MAK Center works to utilize the materials of the medium itself as a signifier to reimagine its expectations and possibilities. Through this experimentation, the material properties of the film are presented as the means to disassemble its impact.
Philipp Fleischmann is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna, Austria. He primarily works with the medium of analog film. For his projects, he often develops site-specific cameras that allow him to reflect on the physical and cultural dimensions of institutional spaces. Since 2014, he has served as the artistic director of the School Friedl Kubelka for Independent Film in Vienna. He has had exhibitions and screenings at venues including the Lyon Biennial, São Paulo Bienal, Macro Museum Rome, Berlinale Forum Expanded, Austrian Filmmuseum, Vienna Secession, Toronto International Film Festival, mumok kino and Anthology Film Archives, NYC.
The Artists & Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments is funded by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport, in cooperation with the MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.