l'arrière-cour, 2022
in collaboration with Jeanne Tara
And what if, instead of seeing a city’s buildings, we only see the relationships that exist between them? Lesser’s question is an essential one, pointing to a possible modus operandi in the space surrounding us. His practice flows between the attentive observation of what is minor – what remains, what is left behind, what seems unimportant – and its accumulation in gestures and stories that Lesser returns to time and again. In this flow, his practice addresses the possibility of an architecture that acts upon the radical conditions of the space we inhabit, questioning latent realities – sometimes invisible, sometimes all too blatant – of the contemporary city.
(Extract from the text written by Román Alonso)
© Isabelle Meister (portrait)
© Thomas Maisonnasse
Vicente Lesser Gutiérrez was born in 1992, in Chile, and graduated with a degree in visual arts from HEAD in 2020. In 2021, he was awarded a grant from the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain de Genève and, in 2022, nominated for a Swiss Arts Award. Alongside Camille Kaiser and Julie Marmet he forms the HOY collective, which in turn founded Espace 3353 in October 2018. Vicente Lesser Gutiérrez’s research focusses on urban spaces and heritage. His practice is primarily articulated through sculpture, installation, and publishing, and largely involves the practice of walking. In doing so, he observes the effects of the city and environment on its inhabitants and their own practices, apprehending urban planning and architecture both as a technology dominating (or domesticating) bodies as well as a source of formal inspiration. For the past three years, he conducted research on the different ways one inhabits a city, appropriates a territory, and the relationships between a city and its inhabitants.
Website Vicente Lesser
Instagram @lesser.v
Window display: courtesy of Fondation Coromandel
Vicente Lesser
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