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François Roche is the principal of New-Territories (R&Sie(n)). He is based mainly in Paris after 10 years (2011-2021) in Asia-BKK-Tokyo-Melbourne.
New-Territories is a polymorphous architecture organization. Founded in 1993, it has embraced different labels, names, strategies and purposes. New-Territories is fronted by the androgynous avatar, trans-gender avatar, _S/he_, who authorized François Roche to write, talk and teach on his/her behalf, as a PS / personal secretary, an Ariadne’s wire of this ectoplasmic system and paranoiac mind. New-Territories emerged through the multitude of meeting points, friendship and dispute, in the hollow of sympathy, empathy, antipathy ...
François Roche architectural designs and processes have been show at, among other places, Columbia University (New York, 1999-2000), UCLA (Los Angeles, 1999-2000), ICA (London, 2001), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2004, 2019), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2003), MAM / Musée d'Art Moderne (Paris,2005, 2006), the Tate Modern (London 2006) and Orléans / ArchiLab (1999, 2001, 2003).
Work by R&Sie(n), New-Territories were selected for exhibition at the French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennales of 1990, 1996, 2000and 2002 (they rejected the invitation that year), and for the internationalsection in 2000, 2004, 2008, and, in 2010 both International and Austrian Pavilion, and, small multiple buzz in 2012 cession (Dark Side Curating, Slovenian Pavilion, Writing Architecture), in 2014 in the Pavilion Bembo …
New- Territories was selected at the first Biennale of Chicago in 2015, the last Bienniale of Istanbul in 2016, and a personal large retrospective, titled "s/hewould rather do Fiction Maker" at the FRAC-Orleans on 1500 m2 in nov-march 2017. It was followed by Trienale of Tokamachi, Japan, Biennale of Shenzhen 2019, Mori Tower 2020, Bangkok Biennale 2020 … including severalmain solo show at MAM Paris, Le Laboratoire Paris, Frac Orleans, The Institute of French Architecture, and many private Galeries in Asia, Bangkok, New-York, Paris, Madrid…
Among the teaching positions held by François Roche over the last decade, he was guest professor at the Bartlett School in London in 2000, the Vienna TU in 2001, the Barcelona ESARQ in 2003-04, the Paris ESA in 2005, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 2006, the Angewandte in Vienna in 2008-09, the USC - Los Angeles from 2009 to 2012, Gsapp-Columbia University from 2006 to 2013, in 2012-14 Upenn, Philadelphia, and guest professor at RMIT, Melbourne, from 2012 to 2018.
Roche is teacher at EGS international, Saas-Fe in Switzerland since 2015. In 2012 François Roche was the guest editor of LOG#25, NY Critical Revue, forthe issue released in July 2012: title / reclaim resis(lience)stance.
New-Territories is organized on four sets of themes: Research as Speculation, Fiction as Practice, and Practice as Lifespan (H&N), and Daily Pathologies Disorder:
- Here and tomorrow (fiction / from Latin fictio as “a making to form, mold, shape...”): An architecture which expresses the action to produce in differedand altered time. Simultaneously operative and fictional, it tries to re-scenarize the relation with a situation, an environment, an industrial innovation like a capable fiction to become a vector of reality, a principle ofcapable expertise of transforming this same reality.
- Elsewhere and simultaneously (speculation): An architecture which expresses the action to produce in a speculative time, and which works out devices between robotics, mathematics, neurobiology and biochemistry, in order to take the risk of a critical, political and esthetic emission. The investigation of the new technological tools opens lines of thoughts which nourish and nourish the imaginary ones. New-Territories tries through manifest exposures to give an account of the field of these possible, but also of their projection and uncertainties, mishearing and misunderstandings … but robotic and computation (including some academic Lab(s) research and teaching called (n)certainties at Gsapp /RMIT /Angewandte /USC /RMIT /UPENN …
- Here and Now: An architecture which expresses the action to produce in real-time, and that this moment indicates the fragile moment which negotiates with the arrow of time, with the transitory one or what seems the being in orderto give an account of the strategies of interventions like as much of negotiation with the constraints and the economies.
- MythomaniaS as daily routine: An anthropo-technic research on humanpathology and exhibitionism, through situations, machinism, robot, sensorinterface narratively interlaced by movie production with fictional scenario.
New-Territories unfold their protocols through the re-staging of different kinds of contemporary relationships: aesthetical, machinist, computational and even artificial. They employ speculations and fictions as operative strategies to unalienate operative modes and infiltrate "media culture" in order to subvert its conventions. They consider architectural identity as emanating from uncertainty principles defined through provisional processes and forms in which animism, vitalism and mechanism become vectors of dynamic mutations.
They critically engage contemporary technology in experiments alchemically mixing Eros and Thanatos to develop deliberately ambiguous scenarios that fuse realities that would seem immiscible. Their synthetic devices work out possible somewhere between attractions and aversions, simultaneously mixes of obstacles and possibilities, waste material and efflorescence, threats and protections, mechanical powers and natural forces. Here everything is intertwined and knotted, in the process of becoming, in a movement in becoming.
“Let yourself slip through their work and feel its silky and strange texture as terrifies and caresses you.”
