David Berge

The visual cargo of Me, Le Corbusier, and a Friend consists of 121 photographs, most of them never published before, taken by Le Corbusier and August Klipstein, using a single, shared camera and glass plates—a feat of physical endurance that is hard to imagine today. The plates’ imperfections create a sense of primitive authenticity, of an archaic world emerging through layers of time.
The audio component of the book is a “dialogue” between the two protagonists—a playful mise-en-scène by artist David Bergé—which imagines the two young Swiss men moving through different landscapes and discovering themselves with the tools they share: a camera and a guidebook for Westerners. The result is a speculative journey in which exploration becomes both a way of seeing and a way of discovering who they are.
David Bergé is an artist whose works transform everyday life and objects into time and book-based forms that are often participatory. Recent works have taken the form of material writing and situated publishing, such as his book Bialetti: A Catalogue (Spector Books, 2023), which proposes what a catalogue for the ubiquitous Italian design firm—unusually, one that kept no records—might look like. Bergé is the founder of kyklàda.press and the cofounder of Time Based Editions.