Encyclopédie Vagabonde, 2022

Antoine Grumbach  

Antoine Grumbach, is an artist, urban planner, and professor emeritus at the Paris-Belleville National School of Architecture. Grand Prix national d'urbanisme in 1992, he was invited the same year to present his achievements at the Center Georges Pompidou as part of a personal exhibition dedicated to him. In teaching as in creation, Antoine Grumbach explores the fields linguistics, psychoanalysis, surrealism and situationism. The large scale, writing and drawing have always accompanied his “vagrancy". I have always had a fascination with the encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert.

The countless plates and technical drawings accompanied by erudite texts constitute a sort of collective memory that fascinates me. (…) This aspect of incompleteness enchants me, because today all knowledge is incomplete and fragile (…)

Faced with the avalanche of images raised by these reflections, I tried to take the hand, the hand of drawing, and the hand of writing to design plates without subject, without discourse but open to all possible interpretations in a sort of wandering of the mind. This unfinished set made of automatic writing and drawings creates a sort of encyclopedia of my wandering imagination. (…) Ruins, primitive cabins, imaginary constructions and piles of earth often slip into my drawings. In 2019, he made a proposal for the Greater Paris project, considering the Paris Rouen Le Havre axis as the megalopolis of the 21st century. In 2012, he and Jean-Michel Wilmotte won the Greater Moscow project. Among his projects and achievements, also the restructuring of the historic district of Shanghai, the University of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the inhabited bridge over the Thames In London, the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, the Paris tramway and the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand metro station. Since 2015, Antoine Grumbach has been working on global metropolitan issues and has devoted himself to reflecting on Metropolitan Land Art and Aerial Art, notably through his collaboration with ECT to transform the inert lands of Greater Paris into development projects. landscape combining circular economy and land art.