Société Réaliste
Feriköy Greek School

[Ferenc Gróf, Jean-Baptiste Naudy]
Established in 2004. Live in Paris and Maastricht.

The Paris-based cooperative Société Réaliste is involved in the development of research and economic projects in fields such as territorial ergonomy, experimental economics, political design and counter-strategy.
The Ministère de l'Architecture: Culture States (Ministry of Architecture: Culture States) (2008-09), is a migrant working room, that realises and extends earlier research activities. The project examines the relation between political and cultural entities in contemporary Europe, deconstructing the state as a representation of space. The installation in İstanbul offers a critical cartography with three elements: a typographical wall piece entitled Die Zukunft (The Future) is a pastiche of Clausewitz's famous sentence on war as the 'extension of politics by other means'. The artists have changed this to 'The future is the extension of the past by other means' and have written it as an infinitely multilingual sign using their own font 'Limes New Roman'. On the entrance wall, twenty-three individual letters using Limes font, are printed as a guide to understanding the artists' cryptographic system. These twenty-three letters are the tools for translation, spanning cartography and typography. Finally, on the right wall there are nine research-based maps, set-up like work documents. By carving out current geopolitical marks and figurations, they visualise ideological and geographical borders in terms of age-old fortifications still in use to build and divide nations.