LC postcards collection I 2019–2023

Three-channel video work based on the postcards Le Corbusier collected throughout his life: 2,300 examples that he kept secretly in his Paris apartment. Often mistakenly dismissed as simple tourist souvenirs, these postcards are not the traces of a correspondence, since Le Corbusier neither sent nor received them. They should rather be seen as an important source of inspiration, in dialogue with the architect’s other tools of research and creation. The collection began in the early 1900s and continued until his death in 1965. It forms a visual legacy of monuments, architecture, landscapes, works of art, nudes, objects, figures, vehicles and cities from all over the world, which Chironi digitized in person at the Fondation Le Corbusier (FLC) in Paris.
This visual heritage of immense value is the material from which Chironi builds a visual, temporal and geographical journey. The viewer is immersed in it, accompanied by a series of sound compositions by Henrik Svedlund, recorded inside apartment 258 of the Unité d’Habitation in Berlin for the project My house is a Le Corbusier, an artistic residency in which Chironi lived and worked in Le Corbusier’s homes scattered across twelve countries. The project takes on further meaning from the period in which it was created, the lockdown, when Chironi, in Italy, used these images as a window onto the world.

My sound is a Le Corbusier I 2014 in progress

The sound-focused branch of the project My house is a Le Corbusier: a series of sound compositions based on recordings made in Le Corbusier’s houses, in collaboration with sound artists and musicians.

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My sound is a Le Corbusier (Cité de Refuge), Paris, 2014, Cristian Chironi / Francesco Brasini.
Side A: Cristian Chironi / Francesco Brasini, duration 24m 55s (recordings made on site during the demolition and restoration phases, sampled into a single sound track).

My sound is a Le Corbusier (Esprit Nouveau), Bologna, 2015, Cristian Chironi / Francesco Brasini.
Side A: Francesco Brasini, Esprit Nouveau, duration 30m 8s (recording of the live performance in which Brasini translates the Pavilion’s measurements into sound using sine waves).
Side B: Cristian Chironi / Giuliano Gresleri, Esprit Nouveau II, duration 24m 30s (a conversation about the EN pavilion).

My sound is a Le Corbusier (Studio-Apartment), Paris, 2015, Le Choeur de Radio France / Francesco Brasini / Cristian Chironi.
Side A: Le Choeur de Radio France / Francesco Brasini / Cristian Chironi, Untitled, duration 23m 56s (recording of the live performance by members of Le Choeur de Radio France in Le Corbusier’s studio-apartment, who choral-sing, using only their voices, a score obtained by converting the apartment’s measurements into frequencies, and then into musical notes).
Side B: Untitled, duration 23m 56s (a sound document of the apartment’s restoration phases).

My sound is a Le Corbusier (Unité d’Habitation), Marseille, 2015, Massimo Carozzi / Alessandro Bosetti / Cristian Chironi / Francesco Brasini.
Side A: Alessandro Bosetti, Xenakis non ha mangiato nulla, 16m 06s (the work starts from an unedited segment of the recording of a dinner between Alessandro Bosetti, Cristian Chironi and the ghost of Iannis Xenakis, held in the kitchen of apartment 50; fragments of Xenakis’s compositions are modeled onto the speech); Massimo Carozzi, B5.N 43° 17′ 3.389” E 5° 22′ 21.727”, duration 4m 14s (sound recording inside the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille).
Side B: Cristian Chironi / Francesco Brasini, Mistral, 21m 14s (Brasini edits some sound fragments of the Mistral recorded by Chironi beneath the pilotis of the Unité d’Habitation, a wind that blows from the northwest across the building’s architectural measurements as across a sail).

My sound is a Le Corbusier (Casa Curutchet), La Plata, 2016, Francesco Brasini / Cristian Chironi.
Side A: Francesco Brasini / Cristian Chironi, Silent Tango, duration 17m 04s (two pairs of dancers from the Casa del Tango Gardel in La Plata listen to music through headphones while their steps on the floor are recorded, turning the hall of Casa Curutchet into a resonating speaker cabinet).
Side B: Francesco Brasini / Cristian Chironi, Studio per la contemplazione immaginaria di uno spazio all’interno di Casa Curutchet (“Study for the imaginary contemplation of a space inside Casa Curutchet”), duration 23m 54s (sessions of single saxophone notes, recorded by Chironi during his residency and recomposed by Brasini to create a sound continuum that propagates through a room; the result gives the place a kind of contemplative form, while a perimeter defined by the listener is simultaneously established).

My sound is a Le Corbusier (Pierre Jeanneret Museum), Chandigarh, 2017, Daniela Cattivelli / Cristian Chironi / Dominique Vaccaro.
Side A: Daniela Cattivelli / Cristian Chironi, Clacson (“Car horn”), duration 11m 14s (Cattivelli edits sound fragments recorded by Chironi during his residency in Chandigarh, filtering them through a vocoder that generates additional frequencies while leaving the original sound on the surface).
Side B: Dominique Vaccaro / Cristian Chironi, Chandigarh Swing, duration 16m 20s (an electroacoustic composition by D. Vaccaro based on the spatial and temporal relocation of sound recordings and field-recording fragments collected by Chironi during his residency in Chandigarh).

My sound is a Le Corbusier (Apartment 258 – Unité d’Habitation type Berlin), Berlin, 2019, Henrik Svedlund.
Henrik Svedlund, Strasse, duration 19m 26s; 5m 8s; 9m 38s; 15m 1s (four sound tracks by the musician and owner of apartment 258, where Chironi spent his residency together with the owners Henrik and Natalia Svedlund).