Conversations

“Gespräche” is an ongoing series of blueprints in which Julien Paccard produces visual imprints from glass panels. For this exhibition, he presents blueprints captured from the glass panels of typical telephone booths found in Berlin. In the 1990s, these booths were still common places to make a call, offering partial shelter from wind and urban noise. Today, public telephones are often broken and, even when functioning, rarely used. Gradually dismantled, the few that remain occupy an ambiguous place in the city.

As their original function disappears, the side glass panels have become surfaces for expression. Pedestrians use them to place advertisements, stickers, and handwritten messages within the limits of the glass. A seemingly banal structure thus turns into an open field of possibilities—a shared visual and linguistic ecosystem shaped by anonymous users. This shift in use and perception reflects subtle transformations in urban life.

The blueprints capture these surfaces as snapshots of indirect interactions taking place in the street—visual residues of ongoing exchanges. Their dense compositions of overlapping texts and marks recall the notebooks of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), who filled pages with drawings, fragmented words, and scratched marks while undergoing electroconvulsive therapy. In both cases, layered inscriptions underline violence.

Historically used by architects from around 1870 to 1940 as an inexpensive method for reproducing drawings, the blueprint process has largely disappeared with the rise of photocopying and Computer-Aided Design. By reactivating this obsolete technique, the series transforms a tool of technical reproduction into a means of recording the informal inscriptions of everyday urban life.

“Gespräche” ultimately reflects on the city as a space of coexistence and negotiation, where overlapping marks reveal collective expression and the ongoing struggle for space and visibility.