Chayé Alexis Agbetou was born in 1987 in Angers, Pays de la Loire, France. After spending his younger years in East Westphalia, Germany, he moved to Düsseldorf to study at the Peter Behrens School of Arts, and graduated in 2013 with a Bachelor's degree in Architecture & Interior Design.

 

In the Summer of  2013, Agbetou helped to plan and implement a social building project in Cape Town, South Africa. On its completion, he moved to Berlin, Germany, where he was commissioned to carry out a design planning project—an experience which proved instrumental in developing further skills in the field of visual space and image design.

 

Over the years, Agbetou never lost sight of his passion for academic debate. Indeed, studying architecture „Baukunst" in the class of Prof. Max Dudler at Düsseldorf Art Academy supported the development and consolidation of his own aesthetic style, which still conceptually shapes his designs today. At the same time, his work can also be interpreted and understood through the lens of his biographical history: a combination of influences from his Beninese roots—which led to an intensive preoccupation with the origins of architectural and cultural history—and his French-European homeland—starting from Romanticism and extending to Brutalist Modernism.

 

Agbetou draws from an intensive photo-documentary practice to explore and open up a diverse range of topics.  His work is iconic for the way he interweaves ensembles of landscape spaces, people and structures, and mobilises them for profound conceptual designs.