SAINT-LANGIS-LÈS-MORTAGNE.- a build manifest that manages at once to reference the typology of a stealth building and to be completely unmissable arrives in Saint-Langis-lès-Mortagne: Didier Fiúza Faustino’s 365 m² atelier designed for French conceptual artist Jean-Luc Moulène is now complete — continuing the French-Portuguese experimentalist’s investigation in centering the body within all concerns of an architect today. The studio is composed of a series of volumes distributed in constant offset and covered with black rubber membrane: intentionally in dialogue with the bodies inhabiting its space first and foremost; second with the Normandy nature that surrounds it.

Whether in the shape of an installation, film, sculpture, editorial project, temporary architecture, or built-work, Fiúza Faustino has consistently provoked the formal and conceptual demarcations between architecture, design, and art through his practice based between Paris and Lisbon that will be explored in depth through both a publication and exhibition this year.

Spanning more than 25 years, a first institutional retrospective, EXIST/RESIST – Works by Didier Fiúza Faustino: 1995–2022, curated by sociologist and art historian Pelin Tan (MAAT in Lisbon, opening 5 October 2022) and the forthcoming book Architecture for Disquiet Bodies (Lars Müller Publishers: available October 2022) will offer a comprehensive insight into these themes present within Fiúza Faustino’s body of work, independently and realized with his studio Mésarchitecture.

Per Pelin Tan: “Didier Fiúza Faustino’s works transcend borders of society, design, art, and architecture by focusing on and investigating themes related to dwellings for survival, provoking the extension of bodies and design, taking the experience of a form as a queering phenomenological experience, and tuning between architectural desire and the borders of design.”

Other current and ongoing projects include a housing complex in Leiria, a winery in Tondela in the Dão region, and a villa in Falésia, in the Algarve in Portugal as well as the scenography of the solo German debut of the Portuguese/British artist Paula Rego (1935 - 2022), at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover (opening October 2022).