HEAD – Genève
the 27 June 2019
SHOP (by night)
Within the framework of the festival, HEAD – Geneva proposes to question the role of a corner shop within the public environment both day and, above all, by night. The students of the faculty of interior design, under the direction of Youri Kravtchenko and Javier Fernández Contreras, welcome a reflection upon nocturnal consumption in trompe l’oeil and at every level.
Small grocers’ shops are familiar. We are almost indifferent to them, we could pass them by without a care in the world. And yet, something isn’t right. As soon as our gaze halts upon a few details, it transforms into something strange, incoherent. The front window is strewn with errors. Inside, in an overabundance of objects that are almost too good to be true, time seems to have disappeared.
The corner shop, or even the little tobacconist’s are some of the names which are attributed to these everyday locations which light up our nights. How does the night change the socio-architectural aspects of our routines of consumption and work? What will be tomorrow’s areas of consumption? These are the questions which faced the students in redefining the relationship between the night and architecture through the installation of a corner shop created entirely out of cardboard.
Since the invention of electric lighting in 1875, the urban environment has known an expansion and an intensification of human activity which have revolutionised the means of material and cultural production. Associated with the subversive and the unknown, the deformation of daily light cycles has allowed for the night to become a laboratory for modernity. From New York to Tokyo, from London to Hong Kong, the identity of a contemporary human being and their domestic, professional, and cultural space, is inseparable from the night. The corner shop is one of its manifestations.
Composed in three parts, this exhibition invites you to discover the relationship between night and day, the model and its representation, and to live the experience of a total immersion in an almost familiar area: your local corner shop!
Project led under the direction of Youri Kravtchenko and Javier Fernández Contreras, assisted by Manon Portera and developed by the Interior design faculty of HEAD – Geneva.
Director
Jean-Pierre Greff
Professors
Javier Fernández Contreras
Youri Kravtchenko
Assistant
Manon Portera
Students
Alizée Fassier
Clémence Lablanchérie
Gaïanne Legendre
Raphaelle Marzolf
Rui Bernardes Da Silva Philipe