In 2025, Atelier 11 —the last active artist studio of La Cité Falguière— celebrates its 150th anniversary. As part of the National Architecture Days with the theme Architectures du quotidien / Architecture of the Everyday, we reflect on how the daily life of an artist’s studio becomes part of our architectural and cultural heritage, while remaining a vital site of contemporary creation within urban life.
Open Studio, Exhibition, Performance...
October 17 & 18 from 2 pm to 7 pm
October 16 - School visits by appointment
Cultural practice architect and Professor at Columbia GSAPP, Mario Gooden, will present his latest work Black Holes Ain’t So Black developed during his research residency at Atelier 11.
In A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Bantam, 1998), theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking defines a black hole as the set of cosmological events from which it is not possible to escape to a large distance. Furthermore, the edge of a black hole, the event horizon, is comprised of the four-dimensional space-time light rays that forever hover on this edge yet fail to get away.
Hawking explains, “It is a bit like running away from the police and just managing to keep one step ahead but not being able to get clear away!” At the present planetary reckoning of Black, brown, and Indigenous people of color with the forces of systemic oppression, Hawking’s description takes on particular resonance.
Enacting feminist theorist Tina Campt’s concept of “practicing refusal,” Black Holes Ain’t So Black uses juxtaposition and collage of archival images, film, and video, in a three-channel video installation to enact the spatial praxes of liberation of historic and contemporary Black life and architecture.
