My house is a Le Corbusier [Villa Baizeau]
Cristian Chironi

03 April 2026 I 17 June 2026
La Boîte I Centre d’Art & d’Architecture

La Boîte – Centre d’Art & d’Architecture, the Italian Cultural Institute of Tunis and Embassy of Italy and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) present the VII Chapter of the international project of the Italian artist Cristian Chironi dedicated to the theme of dwelling.

My house is a Le Corbusier [Villa Baizeau] developed in Tunis over more than two months of residency at La Boîte – Centre d’Art & d’Ar chitecture, in the Medina. The choice of the Medina as a place of tempo rary life allows the artist to confront the local culture and contemporary housing urgencies, transforming the city into a perceptive and narrative laboratory.

The Tunisian chapter of Chironi’s project was articulated as a system of interdisciplinary interventions: the residency in the Medina as a space of temporary life and confrontation with local culture and contemporary housing urgencies; the performances Carthage Drive of urban cros sing; the production of visual and textual materials; the theoretical dee pening Villa Baizeau: an architecture to tell during a public meeting at the École Nationale d’Architecture & Urbanisme (ENAU). The exhibition is the penultimate piece of this process which will conclude with the publication of a book that collects and returns the experience.

Started in 2015, My house is a Le Corbusier was born as a dwelling journey, performative practice and instrument of anthropological and architectural research. The project is articulated in a series of expe riences realized inside the architectures designed by Le Corbusier in the world: 12 nations where the artist stays for variable periods. The pecu liarity of the Tunisian stage resides in the impossibility of inhabiting Villa Baizeau – the only building designed by Le Corbusier in Tunisia, built between 1928 and 1930 on the hill of Sainte Monique in Carthage – situated inside the presidential park: dwelling thus transforms into mental experience, threshold, distance. Chironi uses these architectures as observation points on the world, connecting them with a personal and cultural narrative thread and inter preting Le Corbusier not as dogma, but as a living space. The expe rience of dwelling thus becomes an artistic language.

The inspiration comes from a biographical episode that intertwines private memory and the history of architecture. In the second half of the Sixties, Costantino Nivola entrusted the family of his brother in Orani – home town of Nivola and of Chironi himself – with a project by Le Corbusier, inviting them to build their house following scrupulously the drawing of the Master. The project was put aside because, according to them, “it had neither doors nor windows and resembled more a hovel”. Nivola took it back with him, and its destiny remains unknown.

Starting from this episode, Chironi investigates the contemporary processes of communication, interpretation and cultural transmission. In a time marked by economic precariousness and transformations of dwelling, the artist symbolically chooses to trade stability for the freedom of tem porarily inhabiting the architectures of Le Corbusier in the world.Also the choice of the Fiat 127 dialogues with a family anecdote linked to the figure of Costantino Nivola. In the early Eighties, Nivola asked his nephew Daniele Nivola to recover from his house-studio in Tuscany some personal belongings, among which precisely a Fiat 127. Unaware of the value of the load, Daniele drove to Orani cramming into the car sculptures and sketches by Nivola and other important artists: an unconscious transport of heritage, both physical and cultural. Chironi reactivates today that gesture as a passing of the baton and as a provo cation to become “residents of the world”, transforming a private episode into a narrative matrix that crosses the project.

In this path, Villa Baizeau is one of the most significant stages. Built in 1930 for the industrialist Lucien Baizeau, the villa represents one of the first experimentations of adaptation to the Mediterranean climate through suspended volumes capable of favoring shade and natural ventilation. Baizeau imagined it as a possible replicable industrial product; in the landscape, the villa imposed itself as a radical presence, assuming the traits of an almost anti-colonialist architecture. In the Tuni sian chapter, Villa Baizeau becomes a metaphor of the limit. Situated in the park of the Tunisian presidential palace, it introduces a condition that radically interrogates the project: dwelling is declined as a mental and perceptive experience, while the city – with the Medina as a pulsa ting center – configures itself as a narrative laboratory. Cristian Chironi assumes dwelling as a critical device: renouncing ownership in a time of economic instability, he elects the houses of Le Corbusier as privileged observatories from which to interrogate, in the different cultural contexts, the modernist legacy and the current state of the “house of men”

Cristian Chironi
Cristian Chironi (Nuoro, 1974) is a visual artist whose research intertwines visual arts, architecture, performance, and autobiographical narrative. His work investigates the relationship between built space, memory, and cultural identity, adopting dwelling as a critical practice and a tool for knowledge.

www.cristianchironi.it

Biography