Org
Wall 1500

Sebastian Summa

Objects often come from encounters, and in this case I encountered the object first. My friend Isabelle Baudry is a stylist, mainly working on music videos and fashion photography. I told her I wanted to photograph a German apartment, to move beyond our usual French houses. She had visited a friend's father in Berlin and had photographs of his apartment. It wasn't quite my thing, but in the background I noticed a light made of pieces of tubing. I enlarged the image. “That's interesting. What is it?” Isabelle called her friend's father, who explained that it had been made by a friend of his son, Sebastian Summa. I contacted Sebastian, and Dimitri, Bastien and I went to Berlin to meet him. He seemed a little surprised to see us. We arrived at an old East Berlin workshop. Inside, welding sparks were flying and Pablo Casals was playing at full volume. A young woman with a piercing, a very classical face and black-painted nails was welding, with Casals in the background. It already felt like a legend. Sebastian stopped working and we talked about the light. He had been recycling fluorescent tubes and experimenting, and had made this piece for his friend's father. We looked at it and thought: it's a shooting star! We told him that it needed end pieces, because as a shooting star crosses the atmosphere, it burns and leaves a trail. The tips had to look as though they were on fire. He was surprised and thought we were mad. But the result was the ORG collection, which works beautifully over tables or on walls. Its roots are clearly in the 1920s, but for us it is truly a cosmic object. That is ORG.