Beaubourg works centres on projects around La soi-disant utopie du centre beaubourg (Editions Entente, 1976), a book written by Swiss sociologist Albert Meister under the pseudonym of Gustave Affeulpin. Its publication coincided with the inauguration of the Centre Beaubourg in Paris. The fictional story imagined a radical libertarian space of seventy-six storeys beneath the newly erected centrepiece of French Culture, which provided a platform for alternative ways of living, working and creating.

I first came into contact with the book in 1994, when the Italian translation (Sotto il beaubourg, Eleuthera, 1988) was presented in my home town of Lugano at an anarchist book fair. Later, during a residency at the Rooseum centre for contemporary art in Malmö - whose programme experimented with the relationship between art, artists and the public on an institutional level - I started to revisit the book through installations, graphic works and performances. 

In 2007, thanks to a commission from Casco Art Institute and the artist’s publisher Book Works, I could publish my translation of the original text for the first time in English and introduce it to a broader audience. It was an attempt to revitalise what I thought was a significant cultural treatise and reflect upon my subjective role as an artist in transferring ideas from one cultural framework and era to another.