House of Today is a non-profit organization, committed to cultivating a sustainable design ecosystem in Lebanon, that transcends international borders. For over a decade, the organization’s overarching aim is to strengthen dialogues in the design world, expanding the reach of contemporary Lebanese designers and their creative processes, through mentoring and educating, curating collections and nurturing connections.
Flavie Audi (French/Lebanese) (b.1986) graduated from the Architectural Association in 2011 and completed an MA at the Royal College of Arts in 2014, where she specialized in glass. Her practice has expanded into various media and collaborative projects with fashion, jewellery and furniture designers. Her works has been widely exhibited in Europe and US (Venus Over Manhattan New York, David Gill London, Stedelijk Museum Breda, Galerie Tanit Munich, Karma International Zurich, Elisabetta Cipriani London).
Audi’s practice finds its point of departure within the manipulation of glass. Glass plays a crucial part, for the artist, in contemplating a speculative utopian future world where humans create cosmic fragments and new types of landscape formations. Using the physical properties of glass, Flavie highlights the duality between the real and virtual worlds. Through its omnipresence in nearly all contemporary forms of digital devices, glass becomes a signifier of the tension between the realms of the tangible and the digital, as well as a facilitator of the disappearance of physical objects.
The digital atmosphere that surrounds us threatens the definition and perception of reality. In an era of technological innovation that has seen the creation of flawless, synthetic diamonds, undetectable by man or machine, Audi’s questions how we experience the real. Audi creates fragments emanating from a mass production landscape where gemmology aligns with geology in this synthetic new nature.
Flavie pursues ways of expressing sensuality and luminosity creating dazzled encounters with wonder and the sublime. Her works translate the mechanism of life and light and resemble fragments of an ethereal landscape or geology. The forms and gestures found in it capture a fleeting, living energy and suggest a certain mystery, expressing the energy and essence of existence, a sense of life, hovering between digital screen and celestial body. In a dematerialised world where all is virtual and generic, her work seeks to define a new type of aesthetic and physical materiality and invites the mind to expand in the cosmological infinite.
