Interview with Laure Jaffuel

She is interested in creating design installations and events, focusing on objects and the audience’s relation to them. She has collaborated with important architects, institutions, organisations and designers. Her most recent and major project was in Centre Pompidou in Paris. In Greece, she has collaborated with the Onassis Foundation in creating a collector’s volume of texts and visual material titled “ALL DAY, ALL NIGHT” and with Vogue Greece with her “polykatoikia”, inspired by the Athenian landscape. Between 2013 and 2019 she taught design in a master’s programme of the art and architecture department of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.

-Laure, would you like to introduce yourself? What are you interested in?

I’m a designer from Southern France, I grew up on the Mediterranean coast. I design furniture, interior architecture, scenography and I do art direction for events or cultural and social projects. I used to teach in Studio for Immediate Space, a master’s degree of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, for seven years, which stopped before Covid-19. I am generally interested in producing objects or spaces that function as means of socialisation. The context where my work finds itself is quite important. I try to focus so much on the design as much as on the construction of the situations surrounding the objects. My practice is quite versatile and multilayered. I treat equally the design of spaces, objects, events, situations, sound pieces, parties, scenography or publications. Collaboration is always an exciting part of my job, whether it is with artists, craftsmen, DJs, architects, writers, etc., or simply inviting people to contribute or participate in my projects. I particularly value an artisanal and local production with craftsmanship, know-how and materials that are in my immediate surroundings.

-How did you decide to come and live in Greece?

I was born and raised in the south of France, and I was willing to live in a country that was closer to my Mediterranean culture but also to stay within Europe. So, Greece seemed like a very interesting place to be, I came a few times, I gave it a try and it was a very inspiring place so I decided to stay. It was love at first sight!

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-You are one of a few well known foreign resident designers in Greece, would you like to share with us an experience of yours working in a state in an economic crisis? 

Firstly thank you for saying that, I’m very glad to be a part of this interview, to feel that as a foreigner I’m part of the local Athenian scene. So far it’s been a very good experience! As a living environment, Athens and generally Greece is a very inspiring place to be. Work-wise it was very challenging when I arrived, the economic situation was very fragile and still is, so there aren’t a lot of clients. However, this situation generates a very alternative scene, that is less commission-oriented and more project-orientated, so it was very easy to create a network, to run small projects in cultural and social spaces, like Communitism for instance. So I’ve been vastly engaged with this kind of collaboration and it was very fruitful, which perhaps in other countries would take more time or be more difficult.

The second thing I found extremely interesting and I think is related to the way Athens has been constructed and developed, is the fact that it is a capital but you still have craftsmanship inside the city. You still have a lot of craftsmanship like metal or wood production, ceramic or glass blowing, all this kind of craft is still very present in the city and very accessible. As a designer, this was something very rare for me because we don’t encounter this anymore in Europe. I developed a lot of projects here with local craftsmen and ateliers.

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-Do you think Greece is or will be a designer-friendly environment?

I think in a way it’s not yet designer-friendly because there’s not a big designer scene or designer culture. Carwan is one of the first design galleries that opened very recently in Athens. However, in a production sense, I think it’s very friendly as it allows you to make things, to produce with locals’ workshops. I think it is a very inspiring scene and I hope it will develop in this direction. I believe nowadays it is crucial to address production issues as a designer. To produce locally hand in hand with craftsmen became an important part of my creative process. As a designer, I spend as much time in the studio as I do sourcing materials, or visiting workshops and ateliers I work with.

-We may assume that the experience of this city is the main thought behind your collaboration with Vogue-Greece and your installation work “The Polykatoikia, The Sun, The Column and The Night” and your Onassis Foundation publication entitled "All Day All Night". What is the most interesting and secret thing about this specific landscape that you can share with us?

My take on this subject was to gaze at the Athenian landscape from the view of the foreigner because, of course, it's not exactly my culture, I didn’t grow up here so I have a different perspective on things. I’m generally very interested in public space as a designer. That’s something I’ve been researching a lot and I’ve been in a few projects in public space, so of course, when I moved here I thought it was interesting to study what happens in the public space of Athens. The story started with the Onassis Foundation residency, called Onassis Air, during the first quarantine in 2020, a three-month residency where I focused on researching the Athenian public space. At the end of this research, the Onassis Foundation, in collaboration with Dolce Publishing, published ALL DAY ALL NIGHT / ΟΛΗ ΜΕΡΑ, ΟΛΗ ΝΥΧΤΑ, a bilingual publication in English and in Greek. It’s a collection of several commissioned texts, illustrations and posters, promoting fictional events taking place in Athens, and extracts from interviews I did with many people from the local scene: ranging from architects and urban planners to people working in the municipality, to the sellers in the “periptero” and neighbours, to artists, activists and social workers.

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It was really nice for me to have the time to do this research and then put it together in a book! It gave me a good understanding of how Athens has been constructed, how it functions but also how it doesn’t function, because, I think, the public space here is very rich and alive, but it’s sometimes a dysfunctional city as well. It has a lot of contradictions but I see beauty in this chaos because it is very organic, it has a real public life. People are, for instance, appropriating the space in the streets, which is really rare in most of the cities who want to make a clean urban space. Here there are a lot of problems, but it is very alive, it’s a vernacular city. It has been constructed without rules, without urban zoning or vision, at the same time “by the people” “against the people” and “with the people”, it is a very complex subject but I find it very interesting.

Then I was invited by Vogue to do this “carte blanche” project and the idea was to be inspired by Athens. I was looking for the emblematic thing constructing the city and of course, the “polykatoikia” was the main thought. Then there was the sun, the night and the column. Of course, it was a set designed for the photoshoot, so it was a bit more abstract but it was very much inspired by the city itself in terms of colours and shapes.

-We loved the installation project "Ecole Pro(Space)" that you created in collaboration with Leopold Banchini in Centre Pompidou. What is the main concept of this installation?

Leopold Banchini proposed to me to collaborate with him on this project in 2018 and it was a commission by a special department of Centre Pompidou that is dealing with public mediation by organising activities outside the main exhibition. They have two programmes, one for children and one for teenagers, and they wanted to make one more programme for adults. So they commissioned us to design this room, but the design brief was very hard because the room was only 100m2 and they wanted to have a lot of functions: one kitchen, one atelier, one conference room, one coffee place, one lounge, storage space and a big space for workshops that require body movement. So we decided to work under the floor and this way you could open the doors when a function was needed and then close all the doors to use the whole space as one.

-Are visitor interaction and Relational Aesthetics in general something that you intended to provide with your work? Do you encourage communication between creator and viewer?

Yes and in the case of Centre Pompidou it's a very special space because it's in the middle of the collection and when the space isn’t used by a workshop it's open to the public, which is rare for such spaces. I can see a link with Relational Aesthetics, a tendency in art that was going away from the gallery and using public or visitor interaction as a form of art. Here we brought the public inside the museum. It’s something that I find interesting and I relate it to my practice because as a designer I work mainly within social spaces and public spaces. Any kind of space that would generate interaction with the public or any kind of object or event. I study how to construct a space that will provoke collective gatherings: it can be a club, an office, the street, a squat, a party or an art centre. I try to work with a diverse context and environment. It can be a public bench, which is a very political object for example. Moreover, quite early I will introduce the factor of the public or the visitor/spectator/user within the design process.

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-Of which other project are you most proud of so far? Could you tell us why?

I will mention two projects, one in France and one in Greece! The first is an art centre called Mille Formes that I designed in 2019, in the city called Clermont-Ferrand. It's the first art centre in France that is dedicated to children from 0 to 6 years old and it’s also a centre that has been developed in collaboration with Centre Pompidou. I was invited to design all the interior of this centre but also organise the spaces within this big volume. I was working with the team of the municipality and Centre Pompidou to first develop the programme together and then do the design. As we were designing the project I thought it was relevant to design also the outside space that is in front of the museum. We designed a small public space to be able to invite people in and also form a relationship with the neighbourhood and the city and we decided with the municipality that it made sense to design a new public space, just in front of the entrance. There I also designed the public furniture and the outside parts in collaboration with the architect Sharmily Guyot. To make an art centre you have to start from the street, you have to start from the outside to invite people in. This art centre also has many spaces: an atelier, an exhibition space, a cafe, a more dance-spectacle space, the space dedicated for babies and a space for video screening. There are mixed types of activities and typologies of spaces within the building. So, I think that it was the most accomplished project I did before the pandemic.

The second one I really liked, here in Greece, was the collaboration with the Communitism space, this alternative cultural and social centre in Metaxourgeio, Athens, where I put banners on the facade of the building because I wanted to address people on the street. The two banners, one in Greek and one in English, were saying “Hey you, I care about you. Come dance with me” / “Γεια σου, νοιάζομαι για σένα. Έλα να χορέψεις μαζί μου.”). We also made a t-shirt with the same inscription, silk-screen printing by hand, that we sold to raise money for the building. This was a very nice experience for me to do this project and to meet this community, it was slightly outside my normal practice but it had a relation with public space.

-Thank you Laure for our conversation, can’t wait for your next project!