Dive into the stucco workshops in Cairo!
When Luc Merx discovered the stucco workshops in Cairo he felt as if „diving into the eighteenth-century Rome of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The workshops did not have roofs. Their architecture appeared unfinished and at the same time was already half-decayed and covered in a patina. The walls were adorned with architectural details. The resemblance to historical plaster workshops in nineteenth-century England was striking; in both, the artisans used the workshop as a showroom and a reference for planning their projects. One entered a kind of spatial catalogue. Although these were ateliers, they felt more like a dilapidated, opulently decorated palace. The ornaments themselves appeared not as banal samples in a showroom but rather as a rich archaeological collection that included Roman spolia. Architecture from antiquity had been disassembled into its individual components, creating a sort of building kit. The strict classical ordering system had been deconstructed; the resulting pieces could be recombined at will.“
With four photo series by Luc Merx and essays by Matthias Castorph, Federico Garrido, Holger Gladys, Christian Holl, Luc Merx, Werner Oechslin, Christian Rabl, Rolf Sachsse, Heiner Stengel, Francesca Torello, Dalia Wahdan, Gijs Wallis-de-Vries, Holger Zinke.
A cooperation with the Akademie auf dem Felsberg, Felsberg Future Laboratories.
