(capsules) Pascal Piron & Ben Greber

Your works at (capsules) both take up something we pass every day without really seeing it. Pascal, what will we find in your window?
In a former phone shop at 6 rue Jean Origer, near the station, Public Record fills both windows. On a wall behind the glass hang sheets from a box of 150. Each sheet is one address in Luxembourg. A pen plotter, a machine that holds an ordinary pen and draws, has written every company the register showed at that address on the date stamped on the sheet, one name after the other. When it reaches the bottom of the page, it starts again at the top, over what is already there. In front of the wall, the plotter produces new sheets during the exhibition. Beside it stands Trust me, bro, a small sealed computer that holds my complete copy of the register, which nobody can read.

What did you discover about the city through this process?
That a part of the city is paperwork, and that the paperwork sits in very few places. Most addresses in the country have no company registered at all; a few have hundreds, some more than a thousand. On 8 July 2026, one door in the city had 2,424 live companies registered at it, and an apartment building near the station had 566. The register also moves in ways you never see from the street. In four days in July, more than 300 companies at one door changed their registered address to the same new one, and that door went from 320 companies to 7. And then the names. Most are a word plus a suffix: Holding, Topco, Midco, 1, 2, 3. Sometimes the word is borrowed: Winterfell, Macbeth, Skyfall.

The plotter does not select, filter or editorialise. Why was this refusal to choose important for you?
I do choose: I choose the doors. What the plotter does not choose is the names. Once a door is chosen, it writes every company registered there, in the order of the list, until the list ends. The work makes no judgement about any company. I don’t pick the interesting ones or leave out the dull ones, and the density on the page is the register’s, not mine. A name on a sheet says one thing only: that on the day of my reading, this company was live at this address.

The register is legally public, yet difficult to access. How does this shape the work?
On the register’s website, you can search for a company by name or number, one lookup at a time, each behind a captcha. There is no search by address and no public download of the register. Access for machines exists only as a paid agreement, about 5,000 euros a year, on a reasoned request that the operator may grant or refuse. Since June 2024, EU law has required the register’s basic company data to be free, both as a bulk download and through an interface for machines. Luxembourg offers neither for free. So the work is made of that cost: to know what sits at one door, a program had to look up every company in the register, some 300,000 lookups over three months. The drawings measure the gap.

The work also asks. As a citizen, I asked the operator for access in the form the EU regulation describes, and after one reply, I heard nothing more. I asked the Minister of Justice whether and when the register will be brought in line with the EU rules. The registered letter was signed for on 9 July; after three months without an answer, Luxembourg law lets me consider the request rejected. Every answer and every silence belongs to the work. And the work has an end written into it: if Luxembourg opens the register as the regulation requires, the plotter stops, and the last sheet is dated.

And Trust me, bro, the sealed computer beside it?
It is a Raspberry Pi with an e-ink screen. On its memory card is the complete copy of the register as my program read it, more than 300,000 companies, encrypted. I sealed it on 5 October 2026. The key was made once, used once and destroyed, so nobody can open the data again, me included. The screen shows only a few facts about what is inside, such as how many companies and when they were read. A certificate, timestamped in the Bitcoin blockchain, lets anyone check that it existed on that day. The data is all there, and nobody can read it. For a citizen, the register is a milder version of the same thing.

Ben, your window also shows something that is disappearing, in a very different way. What are you presenting?
The installation High Fidelity consists of four plastic casts of hi-fi components: a record player, an amplifier and two speakers. They are placed on a display unit and arranged like a classic presentation in a hi-fi store window. Despite their shiny, hyper-aesthetic surfaces, the casts are not intact. They have cracks and resemble crumbling concrete. They become a ruin of their own image and thereby embody the process of their own de-objectification.

How did de-objectification become your central theme?
It is the result of an artistic process. It began during my studies with Katharina Fritsch at the Kunstakademie Münster, where I made hyper-realistic replicas of technical objects out of cardboard. Eventually, I realised that mere replication wouldn’t get me any further if I wanted to get to the heart of things. So I began dismantling my representational sculptures and archiving the resulting materials. Soon I noticed that there are developments in the real world that are quite comparable to this process of abstraction: the disappearance of visible correlations is well underway. So I don’t see my work as abstraction, but as a replication of real processes of de-objectification.

Why the stereo system?
I first used a record player in an installation for the exhibition Green Machine at Konschthal Esch in 2023/24. For that work, we cast remnants of illegal techno raves found in the vaulted cellars of a decommissioned steelworks in Esch. I was drawn to the image of an abandoned party in the vanishing remains of European heavy industry. Later, I developed the record player into an autonomous sculpture that incorporates its own decay. After all, it is an object that has become obsolete with digitalisation. Digitalisation not only plunges the post-war fetishisation of objects into an identity crisis, it also upends our ideas of interior design and spacious living. What do we need a spacious living room for if we no longer have anything to put in it? My idea: replace the obsolete items with sculptures.

Both of your works deal with structures that shape our everyday lives while remaining largely invisible. What does it mean for you to make them visible?
Ben: I consider the loss of visibility of social processes and cohesions to be the defining characteristic of our time. It has an enormous impact on society, and on art in particular. As an artist who thinks in images, it is quite challenging to create a visual reflection of a world for which there is virtually no real-world image anymore. At the same time, that is exactly why I find it so exciting to experience the present as an artist.

Pascal: The company register is not secret. Every line in it is public. What you cannot see is the whole: you can read any company, but only one at a time, so you never see where they all sit. Making it visible means turning that sum into a picture. A sheet shows how many names share one address, and how dark the page gets is the measure. You see in a second, from the pavement, what took months to read.

You both describe your work as a form of documentation. Where do you see the line between documenting and commenting?
Ben: Art matters in the marginal areas, where contexts are elusive and defy verbal expression. The idea of art as commentary makes me rather queasy. Yet art is, by its very nature, always a document of its time. That is why I find the term “documenting” more appropriate.

Pascal: I document; others can comment. The sheets record what the register said, with the date of the reading stamped on each one. I add nothing about any company, no word about what it does or why it is there. If there is a comment, it is in the choice of the door and in the asking, and even there I only state facts: a letter, a date, a silence. When two facts stand side by side, the reader draws the line.

Pascal gives weight to something digital, Ben gives form to the disappearance of material objects. How do you think about the relation between materiality and the digital today?
Pascal: The register exists only as data, on a screen, one record at a time. The plotter gives it weight: ink, paper and hours of drawing. The densest sheet carries 643 metres of line. That time is the closest I can get to the time the register asks of a citizen who wants to know what sits at one door. The digital version is weightless and out of reach; the drawing is heavy and in front of you.

Ben: I am not even sure it still makes sense to distinguish between them. There was a time when the digital was seen as something virtual, but I think that was a long time ago.

Both installations take place in a shop window, a space that shows what can be had, and by whom. What role do commerce and access play in your thinking?

Ben: In the 1990s, the news magazine Der Spiegel regularly featured advertisements for the BMW 7 Series. It was once explained to me that the readers were not actually the target audience; the average Spiegel reader cannot afford a 7 Series. But they can aspire to own one. They serve as the “mass of the envious”, a group needed to turn a pointlessly overpowered car into a status symbol. In much the same way, a shop window can define a society’s values by making visible to everyone what only a few can afford.

Pascal: For me, access is the material of the work. The register is public by law, but it can only be read one company at a time. The sheets show what that means at the scale of a city. In the window, anyone walking past can see what the register’s public search cannot give anyone: the companies at one address. Trust me, bro stands at the other end: everything is there, and nobody can read it.

In what ways do you see your work as a commentary on the present?

Ben: I see it as an assessment of the present.

Pascal: It records the present in the only form I trust: with a date. The register changes every day, as companies are registered, move their seat or are struck off. The same door would give another drawing a year later. If the work comments on anything, it is on what it takes, today, to read a record that is public.

Let’s talk about the windows themselves. How did you approach showing your work in a storefront?

Ben: The shop window was the place of longing in the 20th century: it showed not only what one could have, but above all what one could not have. Today, instead of looking at illuminated displays during night walks, we gaze at phone screens. Online shopping and the loss of significance of materiality have plunged retail, and with it the shop window, into a crisis of meaning. The shop window itself is affected by de-objectification. This makes the empty space, the empty street, the observer and even the act of observing part of the installation.

Pascal: The work is about addresses, so the window shows the city’s addresses from street level, where the brass plates are. The sheets hang where a shop would put its goods, and the plotter works in front of them, so the drawing goes on while people walk by. The window has its own line in the register too: one company is registered at this address today.

What kind of encounter do you imagine for passersby who might not expect to see art there?

Pascal: A machine writing names, slowly, one over the other. Most people will walk on. Some will stop and read a name they know, or an address near their work. I hope a few look at the entrance of their own building differently on the way home.

Ben: When I imagine the work on site, I automatically imagine it seen at night, half awake, with the kind of curiosity people have when they look through a shop window. They are prepared to see something they have not seen before. I think this is the perfect state in which to encounter art.

How does the context of Luxembourg City shape the way you think about the installation?

Pascal: It is the city the register describes. Thirteen of the 150 sheets are addresses within 400 metres of the window. People walking past live or work near them, and some of the doors are on their way.

Ben: I don’t know the city well enough to be specific. But the global phenomena of empty shop windows and deserted pedestrian zones are directly linked to the de-objectification the work addresses. I suppose people who encounter it on their daily walk through the neighbourhood will notice this.

Finally, what do you hope stays with viewers?

Pascal: A number and a question. The number: how many companies can share a single door. The question: why it takes three months of lookups to know it.

Ben: Their very own thoughts.

Discover 

Pascal Piron's (capsule) | Ben Greber's (capsule)