Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil construct and deconstruct spaces. Extensive training and experience afford them an absolute mastery of volume with which to recreate a universe that seems completely illogical at first sight. 

Martine Feipel studied visual arts at the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, the University of the Arts in Berlin and at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London, where she obtained her MA in Fine Art. Jean Bechameil has worked since 1990 as a freelance sculptor. He has produced many of Lars von Trier’s play and film sets, including Antichrist, Manderlay and Dogville.

Based in Luxembourg, the couple have collaborated together since 2008.

Hotel Utopia. Video that includes a participatory action. 8’ 48’’. 2018.

Hotel Utopia is a project that starts from the ruined structure of a building that was going to be a hotel in Ibiza and was conceived by the renowned architect Josep Lluis Sert. The construction project began in 1969 and was stopped in the 1970s, being completely abandoned after Sert’s death in 1983. To date, the fate of the ruin remains uncertain. The video collects the ephemeral and participatory intervention that was carried out in that structure, paying homage to Sert’s architecture and, more generally, to the ideas, the utopian promises and the dreams of a modernity that becomes a metaphor for dissatisfaction and the unresolved contradictions it contains. The goal is not to give a negative view of the building, but to bring out parts of the structure through the act of painting, giving it an abstract and timeless feel, as if the building is suspended between its past and its future.