Laurent Roque’s Door – Challenging the Mundane

A door printed on fabric, contrasted with bright red draping… Fabien Silvestre Suzor’s frame of detail within an installation titled A Room You May Have Missed by Laurent Roque, became the first image associated with Shoreditch Arts Club.

We selected this image because it seemed to encapsulate the anticipation of the opening: a closed door, yet soft, theatrical, evoking curiosity and opportunity. An image capturing a space, an environment which is itself art influenced by architecture.

Laurent Roque is in fact a creative duo, a collaboration between architect Delphine Roque and the artist Amalia Laurent. The collaboration first emerged in their shared flat in London in 2018, from which this image materialised. In an accompanying text about the two-day project, Jessica Freeman-Attwood articulated the many ways Laurent Roque’s installation shared ideals with Shoreditch Arts Club.

Freeman-Attwood described A Room You May Have Missed as “at once intimate and expansive”. How can one transform a 500-square-meter industrial space to encapsulate the cosy interior of a home’s sitting room? Drawing on ideas from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) which articulates home as a space for daydreaming, Freeman-Attwood explained the project as “a site where the ordinary and the unexpected become indistinguishable”. 

Within Shoreditch Arts Club, it is our hope with the constant projection of moving image commissions, curated video art, the cinema and many places to chill, to encourage some day-dreaming. Since its inception, it was clear that the club should be a space for art though not a gallery and therefore we had the idea to create an environment like an avid collector's home. Who is this collector we imagine? Well, it is ourselves and our members: our tastes are eclectic and open-minded. 

The spaces within the club provide work tables, meeting rooms and places to eat. Put bluntly, Shoreditch Arts Club will challenge notions of the ordinary by placing art and design objects to remind us that things are never as they seem and that life by its nature is in flux: that’s the beauty of it.

Installation by Laurent Roque
Photograph by Fabien Silvestre Suzor