Joanie Lemercier and Juliette Bibasse to map Casa Batlló’s façade in 2027

The French artistic duo Joanie Lemercier and Juliette Bibasse (known as Studio Lemercier) have been commissioned to transform the façade of Casa Batlló, Barcelona, in the sixth edition of the house’s annual mapping event. They will create a site-specific projection to show on to the front of the distinctive town house, created in 1904-06 by the celebrated Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. It will be shown on the evenings of January 30 and 31, 2027, accompanied by a live performance of new compositions by the Catalan musician Maria Arnal.

The Brussels-based pair  follow in the footsteps of artists such as Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Quayola and United Visual Artists (Matt Clark), who have carried out the mapping commission, a free public art event, since 2022. Lemercier is one of the pathfinding artists in the medium of projection mapping, executed with environmental awareness, and was one of the pioneer artists, who also included Mario Klingemann and Tais Koshino, to mint NFTs on the Tezos blockchain in early 2021.

In his work engaging with the house and its history, Anadol projection-mapped Living Architecture: Casa Batlló (2022) on to the façade in May 2022, using the output from an AI model trained on an archive of thousands of publicly available images of the house and Gaudí’s sketches. In the lead-up to the opening of his studio’s Dataland museum of AI arts, in Los Angeles, Anadol wrote of the importance of the Batlló project to his practice. “Living Architecture: Casa Batlló was our proof of concept—a moment where Gaudí’s masterpiece building became a living memory ... Now, that philosophy expands into an entire reality ... Casa Batlló was the door.”