Armelie Caron. New York, tout bien rangé, 2005 / 2008
Armelie Caron, in Anagrammes Graphiques de plans de villes - 2005 / 2008 , takes a figure ground map of a city and classifies all the blocks by size and shape. Of course Manhattan is numbingly regular, and Berlin has lots of triangular blocks as axes slice through quite regular fabric. Paris is a surprise, the axes are wider than the blocks, which as a texture are very tiny indeed.
Re-organising pattern is always quite entertaining, sort of visual puns where a letter is out of place and it throws out a whole new, absurd, meaning. These city blocks are re-arranged according to visual rules, rather than urban or historical relationships and says quite a lot about the scale of collective life each individual block in each city. Paris has so many infintesimal blocks, probably the size of one building. These are the blocks of Kieślowski or early Truffaut where there is a very fine line between apartment and street, where private life is small and public life is all.
Armelie Caron. Paris, tout bien rangé, 2005 / 2008