Tell us how this book came about — is it the first pop-up book you have created?
As designers we create both commissioned work and personal and experimental projects, and we have been publishing art books for almost 10 years; we have already created four other limited-edition experimental pop-up books, and wanted to produce this new one to bring together our more recent experiences and thoughts.
What kind of story does the book tell, and what references did you draw upon to create the images?
The book, La Carrière (The Quarry), presents a set of scenes: at the beginning, a mountain – a volcano, almost abstract – which serves as a quarry where stones are cut, sawn and piled. Plans are drawn, a city begins to be built, and the projects within it are both ambitious and absurd. Suddenly the volcano wakes up, destroying the beginning of creation, then goes out, and all is calm. It's a story of entropy, moving from simplicity to complexity and then back to simplicity again, both within history and in its representation.
We are really interested in utopian architects such as Superstudio and Archigram, but also and above all the Japanese metabolists and the associated Japanese graphic scene, from Kiyoshi Awazu to Kazumasa Nagai. We also are really inspired by a number of different artists & graphic designers playing with images and structures: Schrauwen, Killoffer, Yokoyama, Paul Cox and Chris Forgues, for example.
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