Claire Laude is a French architect and artist who has lived in Berlin since 1997 and works with site-specific installations, photography, drawing, video and texts.
Her work deals with the notion of trace and the construction of the memory of a place. The idea of the perception of shared memory, the associated phenomenon of “derealization”, and the ambiguity between the imaginary image of a place and lived experience are central points of focus in her research. She chooses sites, built or in our natural environment, that are in danger of disappearing, being forgotten or transformed and questions their reconstruction, destruction and appropriation. She is looking for the image of the perception of a place situated somewhere between reality, memory and fiction.
She is 2023 one of the Laureate at the Villa Salaambô, Institut français, in Tunis. In 2021, her book “A Silentio” was published by Editions Essarter, a monograph with photographs and text that examines traces of history in a context of a rural landscape in three areas in Greece and Italy. With her project “Ephemeral Intersects”, she won the first prize of the Urbanautica Institute Award in 2019 in the category “Space, Architecture & Conflicts”. Her text and images were published in 2019 by Editions Essarter in the trilogy of books The Red Utopias, which brings together different authors and photographers on the subject of political utopias in Europe in a post-Soviet era. Exhibitions in Germany, France and internationally, including Galerie im Körnerpark in Berlin; Pavilion Milchhof, Berlin; Haus des Rundfunks, Berlin; Villa Rot, Burgrieden; Guardini Gallery, Berlin; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Museum Belvedere, Heerenveen; New Art House, Ahrenshoop; NCCA, Kaliningrad; Gallery f5.6, Munich; Gallery Binôme, Paris.
L’Ombre des Arbres de Papier, 2020- 2022
Candela, Festival Lichtkunst Artspring, Pavillon am Michhof, Berlin, 2022.
Collage of photographs taken by a camera obscure and scanned, Fine Art print on PhotoRag 180 g/m2,
Wood, neon light, 208.5293.57.5cm
With a self-made Camera Obscura of cardboard, I took during everyday one year pictures of the shadows of a tree on a sheet of photo paper. This process of repeating an action, something that could feel absurd and foolish, was a response to the situation, the pandemic and feelings of isolation, how to evade this and “to do something”* against an impression of helplessness (Intimations, Zadie Smith, 2020). The light on the paper draws different traces, depending on the weather and wind. With the assembled abstract black and white spots, I wanted to evoke the presence of a tree. The image of the shadows is inverted, this displacement refers to the ambivalence of our world, which is between reality, fiction and dream.
Ciels rouges, 2022
Burnt birch bark from Treuenbrietzen, Polyamid thread, dimensions variables
Silent Spring, Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, 2022.
Installation made from pieces of burnt birch bark collected in Treuenbrietzen, where 2018, more than 300
ha of a forest have burned (and again 2022). During 5 years, Pyrophob, a project, that brings together 8 scientific institutions, will study if and how it is possible for an ecosystem to regenerate by itself. Thanks to Pierre Ibisch and the team of HNEE, I could have follow some parts of the project.
The decontextualization of these materials from Treuenbrietzen refer to the precariousness of our relationship to the living, and to consider our environment made both of fragile resources and phenomena that are beyond us.
Cendres, 2021
Sunflower stems burnt and cut in the middle, Polyamide thread, Remains of ashes, variable dimensions,
here 35030050 cm,
Galerie Subtei. Berlin. Breeze & Storm, Luft, 48 Stunden Neukölln.
The plant pulp is a tissue inside the stem that is made up of living cells and allows the circulation of vital elements essential to photosynthesis. In some plants, such as sunflowers, this substance dries up as they grow, leaving an empty cavity inside the plant. The installation consists of bars cut in half lengthways and burned. Cutting them in half reveals this emptiness and residue of an essence.
La Maison de Verre, 2019.
Installation, old found windows, wood, glas, remains of painting.
Variable Dimensions here 500250250 cm
Fragments, Guardini Galerie, Berlin, 2019
© Bernd Hiepe, 2019
La Maison de Verre is the reconstruction of a first installation 1 as 1 in 2, which I built in Kaliningrad in 2016. The stories of Berlin and Kaliningrad have similarities, like a debate about the reconstruction of a destroyed castle. The new interpretation of my first installation relates to this comparable historical phenomenon. Facts and memories are supplemented by new “realities” and parts of the story are forgotten and overwritten. The shape of the installation resembles two halves of a blown-up house. The division is an answer to the perception of two histories and identities.
The title of the work is named after the book “The Glass Room” by Simon Mawer, and refers to Mies van der Rohe‘s Tugendhat House. This house is used during the story as a home, as a genetic laboratory for Nazis and later as a sports hall and shows how architecture can influence and shape people‘s behavior.
Les Tracés Perdus, 2019
Altered States. Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2019.
Print on french silk, 185 g, 323062 and 223058 cm
In a room in an abandoned military’s place in the Brandenburg’s forest, during and after the second world’s war, the flight charts of the planes were previously drawn on Plexiglas. The ceiling was covered with canvases, which I dismantled and reassembled, like a series of overlapping empty planes. The title „Lost Paths“ refers to maps taken at that time and that have disappeared.
Ephemeral Intersects, 2016-2020
Durchkonstruierte Situationen, 2017. NCCA. Kaliningrad.
Installation, 2 Photographs, 61,6 * 58,6 cm, 57,1 * 70,5 cm, Analoger Handmade Print on FUJI DP II matt Paper, 3 Photographs, 80 * 80 cm, Print on wood, Drawing, 84,1 x 118,9 cm, Canson Art 180 g/m2 – 6 found roof laths, 2- 2,60 m, 4 found parts of windows, around 1,20 m each.
1, as 1 in 2, #01, 2016.
Kronprinz. Kaliningrad
Print on wood – 80 * 80 cms
Installation, old found windows, glas, remains of painting, variable dimensions
The form of the installation was constructed to suggest an exploded split house. This bursting symbolize the perception of a city divided between two histories, a Soviet, a German and between two kind of states, utopia and dystopia. The installation has been made from windows found in the city of Kaliningrad and built in a historical site, Kronprinz.
The choice of the wood material for the printing is, on the one hand to refer to the original material of the installation, but also to sublimate a first realization made of recovered materials, and to give the illusion of painting. This aesthetic sublimation and this repetitive process refer to the process of derealization and a perception situated between reality and illusion, depreciation and sublimation.
X is to Y as Y is to Z, 2016.
Analog hand-made print on FUJI DP II matt Papier, 104,6 * 89,5 cm.
Wood and remains of mobilar, polyamid thread, remains of painting, sand, 52022590 cm
“In a deserted place, Claire Laude allows forgotten objects to transform into an installation before a window. People have left traces over time, whose persistence she interrogates during the fragile process of its construction. Laude makes adjustments layer by layer and adds her own traces as she works. In a minimalistic and abstract fashion, she recombines the layers like sediments, attending to colour and backlighting. Light streams between the panels, touches the material and makes traces visible. At the same time, it dissolves the objects’ weight in gentle colour gradients so they appear to float in the room. Instability characterises the installation, connoting transience and disappearance – but not completely. These remnants overlap in layers that influence each other and allow a fragile present moment to emerge, which reveals itself in the image.
X, Y and Z are the axes of the spatial coordinate system and refer to the three dimensions. The physical room, filled with the traces of life from past times, becomes a surface within the image and a game between the dimensions begins that interrogates the perception of space in relation to its pictorial representation.” Tina Brueser
