Me, Le Corbusier, and a friend

A book taking 43 minutes and 240 pages. A printed book activated by a sound space and your hands. The audio leads you through a printed archive of photographs while we follow a staged story and dialogue of two young people encountering themselves during a seven-month trip to “the Orient” in 1911.

The audio component of the book is a ‘dialogue’ between the two protagonists—a playful mise-en-scène by artist David Bergé—in which August (the friend), and Charles-Édouard (who will later become the architect Le Corbusier) build formative experiences with the tools they share: a camera and a guidebook for Westerners.

The visual cargo of Me, Le Corbusier, and a friend consists of the photographs they took on this trip using a single, shared camera and glass plates—a physical effort that is hard to imagine today. The plates’ imperfections create a sense of primitive authenticity, of an archaic world emerging through layers of time.

This book offers two unique ways to experience it: privately, through your own phone and headphones, or collectively, as part of a live, participatory performance. In the group setting, 20–30 people engage with the book simultaneously over speakers—a shared choreography of page turning, fingers tracing lines, or voices softly echoing printed words. In this collective rhythm, attention shifts—from images and representation to your hands and ears going through the book. Sensing the weight of a page, comparing two images, an embodied connection between looking, listening, your hands, and the book object.