Xavier Orssaud
Upright poles with sophisticated knobs, sponges dipped in slip, dishes made of glaze and river sand; everything Xavier Orssaud created at EKWC is artificial and at the same time close to nature. Organic growth but cultivated, translated into ceramics, arranged to evoke some sacred space – vertical poles in a circle tend to do that – bringing the viewer back in touch with a world that never existed. Breaking it down. The poles, inspired on wooden sticks used long ago for oyster cultivation in southern France, are part of Orssaud’s family history. The floral knobs with their mother-of-pearl glaze are cast from glass stoppers for decanters. The sponges come from the loofah plant, an organic alternative to artificial sponges and dishwashing brushes you can buy at the Arab stores in the Paris neighbourhood where Orssaud works. Somehow, knowing this makes the work so much more human, so much closer to life.
Linda Zhang
Architect Linda Zhang (CA) considers her practice to be a provocation of architecture’s capacity to communicate through felt experience—affect as a design process towards lived experience. Her projects engage with current issues our society faces, such as environmental topics and state sanctioned violence, through affect, memory, materiality, as well as emerging technologies including artificial intelligence.
Zhang applied contrasting methods to re-create 3d scanned sites of contested and environmental memory, exploring how the process of making impacts the outcome. She used, for example, CNC-milled molds out of AI-trained 3d scans of Styrofoam and plaster, in contrast to hand-cast molds out of plaster. She then sits with the pieces to reflect on which process fits the work best.
Besides the numerous experiments, Zhang worked mainly on two projects:
1. Looking at the phenomenology of the road at different sites of state-sanctioned violence across Canada and the US
2. By extracting materials for building, we intervene with geological entropy. Zhang brought 3D scans of a former gypsum mine in Switzerland with her asking questions such as: how do we relate with these voids? How can I connect people to these forms and sites, by not just replicating the cave?
But what surprised her the most was working by hand-building and being able to explore the shape by hand.
