Public Record. 31, rue de Hollerich.
The text sent with the sheet
31, rue de Hollerich. L'ancienne manufacture de tabac Heintz van Landewyck, bâtiment de 1937, aujourd'hui des bureaux. Le registre de commerce y inscrit 178 sociétés au 2 septembre 2026. Un traceur les écrit une par une, par ordre alphabétique, sur une seule feuille A4. Quand la liste dépasse le bas de la page, la machine revient en haut et écrit par-dessus. La densité n'est pas un effet: c'est le nombre. Le nom Landewyck y figure encore, quatre fois. Le registre est public, mais il ne se consulte qu'une société à la fois.
What you are looking at
The Luxembourg company register is public by law. Its interface returns one company at a time. This work reads it at that speed, one entry after another, and draws what it finds, one building per sheet.
At 31 rue de Hollerich the register of 2 September 2026 lists 178 companies. The plotter writes each name on its own line, in alphabetical order, on a single A4 page. When the list passes the bottom of the page the machine returns to the top and writes over what is already there. The darkness of the sheet is not an effect. It is the count.
One hundred and fifty addresses are drawn to date, from a single name to a black page.
Four lines
The building is the former Heintz van Landewyck tobacco factory, built in 1937, now offices. The name is still in the register at this door, four times: the manufacturer itself, a group company, a tobacco company registered in 2013 and a holding company registered in 2012. All four are on the sheet. The move from making a thing to holding a structure is legible in the family's own four lines.
Every copy, no signature
This sheet was drawn for the Land and appeared nowhere before Friday 18 September 2026. The paper printed it across a full page, larger than the A4 sheet. It exists in the newspaper's print run of that one day, in every copy, with no signature, no certificate and no entry in the work's ledger, and no way to make one. The same drawing, in the series, is authenticated once as a whole. Here it is public and out of reach, which is what the work is about.
The printed page
Read more
- Public Record, the work page, with the other sheets.
- Public Record, the first essay, on Substack.
- A country I cannot see, the second essay.
- Compliance as Material, the framework essay, at Critical Playground.
- Brass plates, black pages, the feature at CreativeApplications.net.