Artist:
Louidgi Beltrame (born 1971 in Marseille, France; lives and works in Paris, France).

Material:
Video; sound; 26 min

Description:
“Two architects dreamed of building the ideal city: Oscar Niemeyer created Brasilia in the middle of the Brazilian Mato (Savanna). Le Corbusier went to India to build Chandigarh. Both cities sit like futuristic, concrete mementos of their constructors in the landscape, the few inhabitants we see are mere dwarves. The geometries of Brasilia and Chandigarh construct the film and a dialog is created between both cities.”
—“Brasilia/Chandigarh,” Galerie Philippe Jousse website.

“Over the past decade, Beltrame’s practice has continued to develop in intriguing ways. With a heightened interest in the ability of fiction to elucidate and clarify architectural forms and meanings, he continues to explore the impact of design and architecture on the psychological space of increasingly globalized citizens. For the past decade, the Paris-based artist has focused his acutely aware camera-based gaze on the relics of High Modernism that populate the world. Shrines to both beauty and ego, these structures speak to the hubris of their creators and their material humility, as time carries out its inevitable reclamation project on each once-grand structure.”
—Lisa Steele, “Louidgi Beltrame and a Fiction of the Modern,” Canadian Art (November 1, 2013).