(capsules) is a series of temporary installations that take over vacant shop windows, bringing contemporary art proposals to unexpected corners of the city and opening up urban spaces to contemporary creation 24/7.
(capsules) benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
With the kind support of ERCO
Pascal Piron
Public Record
Location
6-8, rue Jean Origer
L-2269 Luxembourg
In the former shop at 6, rue Jean Origer, near the train station, PUBLIC RECORD fills both display windows. On a wall behind the glass hang sheets from a box of 150. Each sheet is one address in Luxembourg. A pen plotter, a machine that holds an ordinary pen and draws, has written out every company the register listed at that address on the date stamped on the sheet, one after another. When it reaches the bottom of the page, it starts again at the top, writing over what is already there. In front of the wall, the plotter produces new sheets throughout the exhibition. Beside it sits Trust me, bro, a small sealed computer that holds the full copy of the register, encrypted, and that no one can read.
Luxembourg is a financial center, and a company can register with a domiciliation agent, so hundreds of holding companies and funds end up sharing a single door. Getting those names is the job. A grand-ducal regulation allows the Trade and Companies Register to be searched only by a company’s name or number: one lookup at a time, each behind a captcha. There is no search by address and no download of the register. To find out what lies behind a single door, you therefore have to look up every company in the register, some 300,000 lookups, which took three months. Since June 2024, European law has required that the basic data of this same register be free, downloadable in bulk and machine-readable. Luxembourg offers neither for free. The drawings measure that gap.
Biography
Pascal Piron is a Luxembourg artist working with pen plotters, computational systems, and public-infrastructure datasets (business registers, cadasters, ambient WiFi). His practice operates inside the compliance grammars these systems impose - registry interfaces, audit procedure, state regulation - and renders, through compliant operation, the architectures' own opacities. Current works include Public Record, a mobile plotter that draws the Luxembourg business register at the addresses where entities are legally domiciled, overwriting names until the sheet saturates into illegibility; Trust me, bro, a sealed encrypted device holding the same scrape with the key destroyed at sealing; PARTITION, a WiFi sensing installation where consent to be observed is formally indistinguishable from the act of looking; Terminal Gradients, a plotter whose ink degrades under atmospheric data; and Cadastre, a live drawing where audience presence simultaneously constructs and erodes the image.
He calls the category Compliance as Material. Earlier work, produced in collaboration with Karolina Markiewicz from 2013 to 2023, spanned narrative cinema, installation, and virtual reality, and has been presented at the Venice Biennale, Berlinale, MUDAM Luxembourg, Casino Luxembourg.
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