GDM: Grand Dad's Visitor Center

“Since her beginnings, Prouvost’s work has been invested in questioning the meaning of things presumed unquestionable. The recurring question, explicitly or implicitly posed, has continuously been what if? What if everything had gone differently? And what if what you see is not what you think it is? One encounters environments that feel familiar, reminiscent of everyday life. But here, the condition of objects […] often appear peculiar. Paintings become serving trays, plants proclaim to feel lonely, travel agencies offer trips to imaginary places […].”—Anna Goetz
Published in 2019, GDM – Grand Dad’s Visitor Center is an homage to Laure Prouvost’s grandparents and takes its title from the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Italy, a Gesamtkunstwerk that brings together installations, videos and projections, sculptures and found objects. As the show held in 2017 at Pirelli HangarBicocca was conceived as a dreamlike universe, a labyrinthine all-compassing installation made of surreal and irregular architectures, the book aims to place the visitor/reader at the center of an immersive setting. Designed on a series of shifting layers, which challenge the linearity of contents with an apparently irregular flow, GDM – Grand Dad’s Visitor Center revolves around the endeavor or construction—of stories, of buildings—aiming to erode the distinction between history and fiction, knowledge and (seeming) nonsense.
Texts by Barbara Casavecchia, Anna Goetz, Giulia Grappoli, Esmèe Lyington, Roberta Tenconi, Stefano Vittorini