MAISON INTÈGRE

MAISON INTÈGRE

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05.12.2022 – 07.26.2022

ATELIERS COURBET is pleased to introduce Maison Intègre Editions from Burkina Faso, West Africa and support the studio’s commitment to foster the country’s ongoing craftsmanship legacy as it brings the local artisans together with international guest designers and artisans in residence. Opening May 12, the Maison Intègre exhibition will unveil the studio’s inaugural series of limited-edition bronze pieces created in collaboration with French designer Noé Duchaufour- Lawrance. 

Founded by Ambre Jarno in 2017, Maison Intègre is a metalsmithing workshop and foundry based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, that fosters West Africa’s long craftsmanship lineage. Maison Intègre’s Burkinabe artisans carry on the lost wax bronze casting technique that has largely remained unchanged since its inception millennia ago. In 2022, the studio built a comprehensive workshop to support the artisanship of fifteen artisans, a meaningful step to protect the craft traditions and provide a livelihood for the artisans.

As part of its program, Maison Intègre has invited French designer Noé Duchaufour Lawrance to spend a significant amount of time with the studio’s artisans and community in Burkina Faso. The series of bronze and brass works resulting from the designer’s immersion in the local artisans’ environment and their cultural heritage, draws inspiration from Burkina Faso’s vernacular architecture and archetypal forms. Duchaufour Lawrance reinterprets and translates forms traditionally sculpted in wood or hand-formed in clay into a single material — bronze. Collaboratively, Jarno, Duchaufour Lawrance, and the Burkinabe artisans used the local time-honored techniques to sculpt beeswax molds, later used to cast the resulting forms with liquid bronze.

“When living in Burkina Faso, you are constantly engaging with crafts in everyday life; you have to be creative and use whatever is around you to fabricate objects—whether functional or artistic. Everything is repurposed, repaired, and transformed with some kind of natural grace, all the while keeping it down to the essential, the functionality. I wish to ​share and ​communicate ​West Africa’s cultural confluences spanning from the Senufo and Mossi arts to a broader West African culture.”  — Maison Intégre founder Ambre Jarno