The Light Hours exhibition offered us a chance to work in one of the masterpieces of the world architecture, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Haroon Mirza, London artist, insisted from the very beginning not to see the inside of the site where he would exhibit, wanting the place to keep its authenticity.

He did all the setting ‘blindly’, not wanting to disrupt the acoustic perception of the villa, and even at the exhibition he attended blindfolded. Later he confided us that he does not believe he will ever return so as to preserve that moment in his memory as a very unique one.

Respect for Le Corbusier’s inheritance, a historical building that is so popular that is even reproduced in Lego Architecture and visited yearly by tens of thousands of visitors, and an artist making stunts so that he doesn’t see the site – these were the starting conditions within which we had to carry out our task. The interior of the villa is an extremely important element of the exhibition, where the artist exploits its characteristic light and installs solar panels which, reacting to the sun, would generate different sounds. Our idea for the visual identity of the exhibition consequently as a key motif uses the vision of a solar panel, but what makes the difference is the reshaping of the proper arrangement of cells so that it reminds compellingly of the characteristic layout of the villa’s interior columns. This solution combines a key factor of the artist’s installation with elements of the building thanks to which Le Corbusier left such a significant trace in architecture.

The exhibition was opened in Poissy by M. Philippe Belaval, Director of the Centre des monuments nationaux, and exhibition promoters such as: Silvia Guerra, artistic director and Laurent Fievet, director of Lab Bel, (Laboratory of Contemporary Art of the French company Group Bel). Surely we could not have missed that kind of event. In the end, a few nice words the curator said about Sonda’s solution: “Sonda’s creative solution is a key factor in the visual presentation of the exhibition and in a very intelligent way it expresses connection between architecture and contemporary art, which actually was the main intention of this exhibition. In particular, I commend the creativity that has hit the core of the exhibition and which for us was very important to be reflected in the materials, as well as an open dialogue that was present from the very beginning between me, the artist Haroon Mirza and Sonda, thus leading to such a final result. I would like to underline the exceptional attention that was dedicated to the production of materials.”

If you find yourself in the vicinity, the exhibition is open until 29^th  of June 2014.