Stéphanie Fabre + Eric Gillet

Stéphanie Fabre + Eric Gillet
Period: 2014-2015
Profession: Architect Stéphanie Fabre & Éric Gillet live and work together. After studying architecture at several European schools, they set up their agency “de l’errance à la trace” in Paris. The name is both a program and a posture: “de l’errance à la trace means keeping an astonished eye on the world around us. It means being able to move away from our point of equilibrium to change our point of view. It means becoming, in a way, strangers to architecture, in order to gain an objective vision of it. Their field experimentation focuses on the relationships between individuals, institutions and their territory, and their work is recognized for its social involvement. In 2006, they were nominated for the Equerre d’argent prize for first work, and between 2011 and 2013 several of their projects were nominated for the Architecture Midi-Pyrénées prize. As part of their residency at Villa Médicis, Stéphanie Fabre and Eric Gillet imagine tackling the question of freedom and/or oppression at different scales, particularly when urban space is considered as a panoptic system. This critical paranoia becomes an urban reading system, a plunge into the heart of Piranese’s universe and its contemporary retranscription in the tradition of Foucault. Is it possible to positively imagine such a terrifying system ? Can it be transformed into positive energy? Can architecture become a weapon against these conditions ? In this context, can we finally put the human, the individual, back at the center of our concerns ?