reinventINg
BEYOND INDUSTRIALISM
To describe Eau & Gaz AB we need to make a little detour:
”Eau et gaz à tous les étages” is a sign one can still find on older buildings in France. It was put on the façade to show that the building was part of the urban, communal system. A system that connected everyone, rich to poor.
The only book about Marcel Duchamp, authorized by and even designed by Duchamp himself, the Robert Lebel monograph published in 1959, was given that title in its special edition. A gesture that could be regarded as a bit surprising for an artist famous for his refusal to be a part of anything or any group. But maybe Marcel Duchamp gives us a hint to why he became the most influential artist of the 20th century. He was the first artist to point out that we need to understand the context we are acting within in order to achieve original thoughts, to make structural changes – and to be relevant.
Just as Marcel Duchamp reinvented the very idea of art back then, today we need to do the same trick on our societal structures. We need to rethink and reinvent the conditions under which our common society is organized. The climate issue is of course a huge problem in itself, but it is more than anything the result of a brief period in the history of mankind, industrialism.
So, it is time to reinvent beyond industrialism. And today, in a digital world, we actually have the possibility to seek new models of living, of coexisting, of sharing – in governance, in business as well as in democratic systems. It is simply time to rethink, to reuse forgotten knowledge, to recycle and upcycle – in order to reinvent solidified systems.
That is the starting point for the existence of this company, named Eau & Gaz.