Bêka & Lemoine with Laboratory for Sensitive Observers. ‘Homo Urbanus’.

Through lockdowns and social distancing, the world pandemic established a global process of disembodiment in our relation to urban space and to social life which deeply troubled our physical condition as urban dwellers. Now at the very moment of attempting to reinstate a ‘normality’, this exhibition proposes a critical interrogation into our individual and collective bodily experience of urban space. The recent collective ordeal of the sanitary crisis, which had the effect of depriving, restricting, constraining and limiting our freedom of movement and behavior, highlighted how much being an urbanite, before being a social and political question, is first and foremost a physical condition – living together, next to each other, in a state of proximity, even of paradoxically anonymous intimacy.

The show explores the multiple facets of the urban body revealing how much our bodies, in their daily routines and rituals, are the expression of a constant interweaving of physical, social, cultural and political issues. The exhibition is composed around the large scale project Homo Urbanus. A city- matographic odyssey of the video-artists duo Bêka & Lemoine. In dialog with this video installation, the show also presents some films produced by the Laboratory for Sensitive Observers, a March design studio led by Bêka & Lemoine together with Gili Merin at the AA Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Conceived as a collective research project, based on Bêka & Lemoine’s films, the studio aims to portrait the Homo Urbanus of today on a global scale.

Laboratory for Sensitive Observers

Chak Hin Leung, Jugaad, 2020

Matthew Ho, Urban Nomadism, 2020

Christopher Ioannou, Anatomy of a city, 2020

Nikola Miloradovic, Homo Mobilis, 2021

Caterina Miralles Tagliabue, Lon(don)liness, 2021

Aijie Xiong, A dissolving rurality, 2021