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Who is Living Structures?
The brainchild of French-born, London-based creative director Florine Bonaventure, Living Structures began in April 2020. “When the first lockdown came, I needed to create space for a personal project, a zone where I could feed myself with things I love,” she says.
The resulting account is an experimental visual essay, the intersection of all of Bonaventure’s key interests—land art and architecture, sculpture and performance. “It celebrates how all of these disciplines help to transcend our experience of the natural world, and asks: How can our bodies activate spaces? To what extent do art and architecture help to reactivate the sensations and feelings of being in nature? And in what ways has nature been turned into a playground?”
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Why should you follow?
Living Structures is a surprisingly touching experience. In a constellation of aesthetically satisfying images of lines and curves, structures and stones, it teaches us about the patterns of nature, and the ways humans have drawn on them. Often, Bonaventure says, her posts come from undervalued or forgotten sources. “It’s important to question and rethink how we live, and one way to do that is to investigate what has been done before us,” she adds.
Having begun the account as something for herself, she now sees it as a productive place to share: “Right from the beginning I received recommendations from followers and a lot of really interesting discussions have sparked from this.”
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What Instagram doesn’t tell you…
Bonaventure graduated with an MA in Art Direction from the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne in Renens. She went on to co-found the publishing house Adventice Editions and launched the art revue Adventice (the theme for the first issue was Architecture and Nature). She is also the senior designer for The Gentlewoman.
The picture that began it all, Bonaventure reveals, was an image of French architect Charlotte Perriand’s iconic Refuge Bivouac, a prefabricated, aluminium mountain shelter. “It was first shown at the Paris World Fair in 1937, and a year later the team put it up on Mount Joly in the French Alps,” she says. “It took them just three days.” Creative feats like this one abound on Living Structures, little stories of human accomplishment which brighten our days as we happen upon them.
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