Our scene is set in the Museum Fodor in Amsterdam on November 9^th, 1972. We are told that it was “smoky, noisy and crowded”, and that the gathered audience made its presence felt through “frequent shouting”. The center of this fevered arena hosted the encounter between two Graphic Designers, two graphistes, two typographers, Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn, in a country where their voices carry, where their thinking is important. A meeting, a conversation, or rather a confrontation, a controversy, it has been described as a debate, one that characterizes the way in which our discipline was represented in the 1980s and that continues to echo today.

This book traces Jennifer Caubet’s work during her residency at the Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts plastiques (Cirva), from 2017 to 2019. Immersed in Cirva’s studio as well as in her own, Jennifer Caubet was able to experience the many variations of the glass material through dialogue with the art center’s team of glass technicians. The sculptural projects she has developed at Cirva question various recurring notions in her work as an artist: how sculpture negotiates the relations to spaces and territories using scale measurements and the interaction with the human body; how gesture and movement determine shape; and where the boundaries between sculpture and landscape lie. Designed as a journey through the gestation stages of her work, the notebooks function as a score, offering, in all transparency, a reading of her preparatory drawings, annotations, studio gestures, and up until her finished works.

Texts: Isabelle Reiher, Lise Guéhenneux, Fabien Faure, Jennifer Caubet