Public Record

2026

Pen plotter, Luxembourg company register data, Hershey Roman Simplex (A.V. Hershey, 1967), 0.2 mm pigment liner on A4

PUBLIC RECORD is a pen plotter that draws every company registered at one street address, name over name, until the page goes black. In Luxembourg that happens often: as a financial centre, it lets companies register at the office of a domiciliation agent, so hundreds of holdings and funds can share a single door. Getting those names is the work. The public register can be searched only by a company's name or number, one lookup at a time, each time behind a captcha; there is no search by address and no download. So to know what sits at one door, every company in the country had to be looked up, one by one: some 300,000 lookups over three months. Each sheet is one address.

One sheet from this series, 31 rue de Hollerich, appeared in d'Lëtzebuerger Land on 18 September 2026, across a full page, in every copy, unsigned. The Land page.

Luxembourg's Registre de Commerce et des Sociétés is legally public: Article 1 of the loi modifiée du 19 décembre 2002 says so, and any citizen may look up any company. Since 2016 the website that serves it has required a captcha before every search, harder with each one, and its terms allow manual and individual use only. Where one address houses 2,424 companies, 2,424 lines accumulate on a single A4 sheet until the names stop being readable.

The work is slow, weeks, months, at the rate a single reader is allowed. The hardest part is not the puzzle, not the barrier. It is the waiting.

The counts here come from one reading of the register, frozen on 8 July 2026 and verified the following day. Each sheet carries that date. What the register says afterwards does not change the sheet.

The missing field is the registered address. This piece is about drawing it.

What emerges on paper is the physical infrastructure of Luxembourg's financial industry: brass-plate addresses, domiciliation agents, single buildings that host hundreds or thousands of entities on their mailbox. One of the Kirchberg buildings whose register entry populates a single A4 is currently advertising itself, on its own facade, as office space for rent.

The drawing is the form the data can take that Luxembourg has not forbidden. I am not permitted to redistribute the database. I can draw what it contains, one building at a time, in public, on paper.

Essay: Public Record | Essay: A Country I Cannot See

Luxembourg City, February 2018. Two mailboxes. On the left, the European Parliament and European Commission identified with strips of plastic label tape. On the right, Hutchison Whampoa Europe Investments Sàrl, with an engraved brushed-metal plaque listing forty subsidiary companies sharing the same slot.

The plotter at work on the pavement, drawing the sheet for the address it stands in front of, the page half written as pedestrians pass without stopping. — Photograph by Boris Loder.

The entrance of 2, place de Strasbourg, an apartment block where the register lists 566 live companies at one entrance. The plotter sits on the pavement in front of the door, drawing the sheet for this address. — Photograph by Boris Loder.

14 and 16, Avenue Pasteur, under the arcade. The ground floor is papered with letting graphics for a coworking operator, a directory panel beside the door lists the tenants of the floors above, and the plotter draws on the pavement outside. — Photograph by Boris Loder.

The plotter begins drawing the companies registered at 15, Boulevard F.W. Raiffeisen. Individual names remain legible, fund designations and SARLs and SICAVs, written in a single-stroke font designed in 1967 for plotters of this kind.

At roughly fifty percent completion, the page has become a dense field. Every name is still there, legible at the scale it was written, illegible at the scale of the page. One company at an address is a line of text. Enough of them make a document whose density carries the architecture of the address.

A completed plot of every company at one address, scanned from the finished A4 sheet. Where the address holds few entities the names stay legible, each line a single company, the page still readable as a list.

A slightly busier address. The lines have begun to touch, though each company can still be read on its own line.

A denser address. The lines overlap and the names close toward a field, though individual entries can still be picked out along the edges.

Busier again. The overlap thickens into a grey mass across the middle of the page.

The completed sheet for 2, place de Strasbourg, the apartment block photographed above. The text closes toward a grey field, legible only along the edges.

A completed plot of an address on Boulevard F.W. Raiffeisen, L-2411. The company names overprint until the page becomes a near-solid field, the form the register takes at its densest doors.

The stamp at the foot of each sheet, naming the work, the sheet and address codes, the date, and a verification percentage.