Encounter with Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard from GGSV studio

For its monthly encounter, My Camondo Pro, the School invites Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard from the GGSV studio for a conference entitled “Ars Memoriae, an architecture for thought”. Scenography can be considered as the art of arranging things in space. The arrangement of objects, images or texts in a place refers to a practice used since antiquity to promote the exercise of memory.

Known as the “method of places” the process consisted of choosing a place, for example a church, that one visited several times, always in the same direction, in order to forge little by little a very precise memory of it. Once the building was memorized, one could mentally deposit images, thoughts, and knowledge by associating them with particular architectural points. Thus, everyone could easily recall this knowledge by virtually browsing the building. The purpose of this practice was to order a large number of ideas in the mind, so that they would be easily available and easily manipulated for dialectic, discussion, reasoning, and questioning. Scenography is a form of Ars Memoriae where the space provides the visitors’ thinking with a mental structure that allows them to differentiate the themes, and to order the objects by facilitating memorization, thus, at a later date, facilitating reflection.

Studio GGSV was founded in 2011 by Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard. Their association produces an atypical approach that ranges from exhibition curating to research design, from objects to interior architecture.  They were awarded the Carte Blanche VIA 2011 with the Objet Trou Noir project, rewarded for its use of dark matter from final waste and the re-reading of household appliances, revitalising the arts of the table and decorative arts around the notion of decluttering. Objet Trou Noir is today part of the permanent collections at the Pompidou Center. Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard designed the interior architecture of the theatre of La Commune, Aubervilliers’ national dramatic arts centre, and in 2016 were awarded the contract for the interior redevelopment of the Musée d’Art Moderne of the City of Paris in conjunction with H20 architects. As curators of the exhibition, they creat “Form follows information” at the Biennale Internationale design Saint-Etienne in 2015, “Zones de confort” (Comfort zones) at the Gallery Poirel in Nancy in 2016 and on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou this year, Gallery Party The exhibition-workshop in progress at the Children’s Gallery.