(When Art Lives in Town)

EXPRESSWAY

Mapped out City
Antoine Pickels and Benoit Vreux

This third issue of Klaxon directly addresses those artistic practices that endeavour to redefine the lines drawn in our cities. To draw a plan or map, in effect a flat representation of a vibrant and complex world, is to invariably assert a standpoint, if not a declaration of seizing authority over reality.

How, and by and for whom, are our cities traced in this way? And what designs and motives do these lines reveal? We will explore the various artistic approaches that examine mapping and urban planning, as well as those practices vigorously attempting to blaze new trails in those maps that unfortunately, as Borges alerted us, are prone to cover-up our territories. A forthcoming edition will be dedicated to the numerous contemporary artistic re-inventions of “the walk”—which in itself dreams up fresh tracks, or reveals existing ones—this edition’s six contributions illustrate the multiplicity of possibilities in re-evaluating plans for the cities we live in, once we long to escape preconceived ideas and open ourselves up to the world around us.

Our “guide,” the historian Pauline de la Boulaye, examines in three stages how the relationship between art and urban planning has altered since the late 1950s. Initially, it traversed a libertarian attitude when confronted with the normalising “modern cartographic fervour”, to be then followed by a form of docile participation in the “cultural tracks” of service sector cities since the 1980s. Nowadays, faced with the recently developed methods of traceability and the growth of geo-location, de la Boulaye raises a cry for a movement to Occupy Maps!

And indeed, the artistic contributions that constitutes Klaxon's central core do speak out about the attempts to occupy that sphere. Works of subjective geography by Catherine Jourdan which have frequently attracted public commissions, aim to provide maps corresponding to the feelings and wishes of the populace, on the scale of a city or a locality, by means of collective, narrative and vagabond images.

The maps drawn up by Échelle Inconnue refute that dominant model that “commands a view” of measurable space/s; they seek instead to reveal the existence of those in a “minority” position that they depict—the migrants, the itinerants, the homeless—, thus creating a plural and mobile location.

What the next two contributions have in common is the charting of political struggles through art in coastal cities. The mapping of the terrain plays a key role in Pula in Croatia and Beirut in the Lebanon. If initially the situations on the ground are dissimilar—one is a coastline permanently hidden due it being a military zone; the other was once accessible, albeit theoretically in private-hands—, in both cases the privatisation of public space for touristic ends is steaming ahead. Resistance against this trend also takes the form of artistic activism, film, sound recordings, the production of information... and alternative maps which in naming the terra incognita, enable local citizens to re-occupy what was once rightly theirs.

To take hold of urban sphere once again, that could well be the credo for many of the young artists from La Cambre Espace Urbain in Brussels a unique place of learning for what is at stake here. Some examples of their work might allow for a degree of optimism—and not really cartographic, but nonetheless enlightening regarding the undercover grey zones in public spaces: artists have yet to finish with the city, and the position taken by the youngest among them is anything but consensual.

In mapping out the terrains of our lives, the artists herein presented continue to invent alternative forms of discourse, and thereby other understated realities, set in fiction or in conflict, which all aim to a greater or lesser extent at a collective re-appropriation of public space.

While we shouldn't scale-down and limit artistic work in urban spaces to these perspectives—to renew, to reveal, possibly even to decry—they now represent one of the essential ways forward in urban artistic approaches alongside the other practices that set out to occupy or re-cast a magic spell on the city.

Cifas.be

MAIN STREET

Urban Pathways, Cultural Tracks, Traceability
Pauline de la Boulaye

Listen to Pauline de la Boulaye

bit.ly/1yOwdMj

A city mapped out? It's a design, a trail. We traverse it, following one line or another. The drawn line proposes a path. And as a “guide” I have to choose whether to follow them or not. Do you follow me? So, we're going to stray off the path and put things in perspective so as to discern where those tracks, those lines in the city that influence our lives are.

The more assisted we are, the less the world around us seems sensational.

First of all I must confess my fears with respect to charts and maps; a fear of being swallowed up, squashed or led astray. Maps tell us what they want. The more they claim to put our minds at rest, the more simplistic they are. Let's take a city map. It should guide us; it prevents us from getting lost or going adrift. It directs. It trivializes. Who has not felt this breach between the flattened and meticulous representation of our streets, and the actual experience or the feel on the ground in terms of atmospheres and/or distances? While looking at a map and following the omnipresent uniform street-signs—or GPS instructions for that matter—concerned about our ultimate and often functional destination, our senses become less keen than were we at large in Mumbai after dark. The more assisted we are, the less the world around us seems sensational.

Yet urban space is laden with invisible things, difficult to perceive insofar as there are signs to distract our attention. And what entertains us is often dull: we employ our frontal vision to watch advertisements, billboards, posters, and maps. To the detriment of our bodily perceptions, which are circular and synaesthetic. By focusing our attention on screens, we swiftly lose the sense of experiencing first-hand.

In our everyday lives we experience emotions and sensations. We perform our daily actions and unusual movements. We change positions, support structures and angles. This is our private life, enhanced. This is what Michel de Certeau, a prominent French philosopher and historian figure during the 1960s and 1970s, called the micro-history of the city, or “the invention of everyday life.” Thick on the ground within cities and yet something we cannot map out.

Between maps and our intimate spheres, between urbanism with unlimited growth and our private lives, we sometimes lose track. The scales expand. It is as though our bodily perceptions are diminished in those hyper-standardised spaces planned for our new world. Whenever I go to the bank or commute on the subway, my senses become dimmer. A space is missing between the flattening of our lives and our sensual intimacy. There is a lack of space. A sensation we experience in densely populated cities. It's stifling! This third space, this missing dimension is the space for freedom.

Many artists were and remain interested in these cracks, in creating spaces off the beaten track. I would here like to emphasize the importance of their struggle with centralised planning, and the intelligence of their critical approach to maps and the systemised planning of our cities and our lives.

In 1946 the Argentinian essayist and writer Jorge Luis Borges was already railing against maps and cartographers in “On Exactitude in Science”, a very compelling and condensed chapter from his collection of short stories A Universal History of Infamy. Possessing a visionary quality, this text’s tri-layered temporal framework strangely interlinks the three issues touching upon the tumultuous relationship between contemporary art and city-planning for over half a century.

Modern Urban Pathways and the Emergence of the Avant-Garde since the 1960s.

The Art of Cartography was driven to such Perfection.
Borges

Most cities on earth were neither designed nor mapped out before rising out of the ground. Maps and plans of all sorts have long followed the evolution of the reality of human disorder. We had to regularly update them.

In the then cartographic frenzy, the planet was being surveyed as never before.

Something, however, underwent a reversal after 1957 when Sputnik, the first Soviet artificial Earth satellite, was launched into orbit to be followed by dozens of Western satellites... This was the first time in the history of humanity that man-made machines scrutinised the earth.

In the then cartographic frenzy, the planet was being surveyed as never before. For the first time we had tools at our disposal to manage urban growth in full expansion. In France, in the late 1960s we set up plans to appropriate the ground, the communal map. Anything connected with allocating territory increasingly requires permission. Maps are turning into an instrument of order and organization. And, thanks to taxes—an income source for the State’s coffers.

It was precisely at this stage that artists and intellectuals reacted and railed against the planification of urban spaces and our lives. In all artistic spheres—visual arts, dance, performance—the enragés during the civil unrest in Paris in 1968 wanted to knock down the walls separating art from life: the walls of museums, the walls of theatres, to take art out onto the street. Participants in Situationist International, members of Fluxus, Dadaists, Land Artists, the Avant-Garde not only attacked the line taken in cultural planning but also that followed in political and social domains. It was as if they felt the urgency to bring us back to our bodies, to life itself, to confront the expansion of the underlying city, in the throes of becoming city image, city plan.

In 1966, at a legendary conference on the heterotopias, Michel Foucault stated: “We do not live in a neutral white space; we do not live, we do not die, we do not love within the rectangle of a sheet of paper. We live, we die, we love in a gridded space, carved, colourful, with bright and dark zones, with different levels, steps on a staircase, hollows, indentations, some ground structures are hard while others are easily crumbled, penetrable, porous.” 01

Les Hétérotopies, a radio lecture presented by Michel Foucault on 21 December 1966 on France-Culture. Under the title Des espaces autres,[Of Other Spaces] the theme became the subject for a shortened and revised version of the lecture, published by Éditions Gallimard in Dits et Écrits, volume IV.

Voices of resistance rose. Here are four eloquent examples of artistic reaction to modern urban design.

1957-1972 : The Situationist International (ill. 1) The driving force behind this movement was the longing to imbue architecture and urbanism with poetry and thus to create a revolution. Guy Debord, the French founder of Situationist International, loved maps and charts: He was described as a poet, a filmmaker, a Marxist theorist and revolutionary strategist. Debord developed the art of being cast drift, which consists of rambling aimlessly throughout the city. He writes: “The difficulties of being drift are those of freedom.” Indeed, everything in effect contributes to steer city-bound footsteps. For the Situationists, it’s not a question of being brought to heel and instead to follow the “psycho-geographical reliefs,” to explore “atmospheric unities” or “hubs” and to become aware of them by drawing up more or less elaborate charts, the legendary psycho-geographical maps.

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Ill. 1
Guide psychogéographique de Paris. Discours sur les passions de l'amour [Psychogeographical Guide of Paris. Discourse on the passions of love], 1957
Pentes psychogéographiques de la dérive et localisation d'unités d'ambiance [Psychogeographic slopes of the drift and localisation of ambience units]
Guy Debord

Lithography
Print on paper
59.5 x 73.5 cm
inv. 000 00 01
Photography : Philippe Magnon
© Collection FRAC Centre, Orléans

1970 : Conquest of Space: Atlas for the use of Artists and the Military (ill. 2) a graphic work by the Belgian artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers. It confronts two ways of expropriating maps and conquering space: one approach is warrior-like and rational while and the other is revolutionary and imaginary.

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Ill. 2
Atlas à l’usage des artistes et des militaires [Atlas for the use of Artists and the Military]
Marcel Broodthaers

1975
Black offset print on white Ingres, 49x63 cm, fifty copies edition.
© Estate Marcel Broodthaers

1973 : Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece, New-York (ill. 3) The American dancer took her choreographic research to the city’s streets and rooftops. (Bear in mind there was no question of Brown asking the mayor, City Hall or the property management companies for authorisation.)

On 7 August 1974, the French tightrope artist Philippe Petit gained fame for his unauthorised high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

bit.ly/1vCEsMl

This feat was the work of a lifetime. He was possessed by this obsessive idea from his teen-years, after seeing drawings for the Twin Towers project while reading in a dentist’s waiting room.

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Ill. 3
Trisha Brown “Roof Piece" 1973
Babette Mangolte

53 Wooster Street to 381 Lafayette Street, New York City
1973
© 2014 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved.

Cultural Tracks – Art incorporated into visible and invisible Walls – since the 1980s

A Map of the Empire, which had the format of the Empire and which coincided with it point by point.
Borges

With urban growth, unassigned spaces—“abandoned” as once described—but yet so held in “affection” by artists—progressively disappeared from the urban landscape in the last decade of the 20th century. Meanwhile, innovative technologies began offering increasingly sophisticated means to survey the entire earth. No space is excluded from these maps.

In the last thirty years, European cities have taken advantage of an array of locations and sites for art and culture—a trend related to the transformation of the city into an urban conglomerate for the service sector. We no longer see where our food originates; we no longer see where our cars are built. Every place is losing its utilitarian function to become a heterotopia (Foucault). Urban renewals schemes encompassed the restoration of slaughterhouses, covered markets, industrial wastelands, funeral parlours; every place is undergoing a transformation to become a venue for art and culture.

Art has become a fact on maps, be they economic, social, touristic, real estate.

Since 2000, systematic urban planning has contaminated the cultural sector: museums, for example, have become the leading figureheads for major urban development, as is the case with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Musée des Confluences in Lyon. Art has become a fact on maps, be they economic, social, touristic, real estate. The creative sector now underpins the values espoused by capitalism. Paradoxically, this has somewhat distanced artists from having direct contact with city-residents. Art as image seems to have replaced the actual presence of art.

Artists are reacting against these new forms of walls. Among the pioneers in this confrontation were visual artists like Basquiat who turned his hand to graffiti so as to find alternative strategies to come closer to the city and to life itself. Some artists define their space or their framework as out-of-frame: this approach came to fruition with site-specific installations in public spaces, a movement that took root in the 1990s, of which Maurizio Cattelan was a leading proponent. The more political control over cultural apparatuses consolidates, the more various art forms—and their practitioners—seek ways to empower themselves.

To escape the expanding walls of cultural alignment, artists now have two options: Festivals, namely a space-time in which subversion is officially authorized, or activism. A third possibility and something that many performers are now doing is to leave the city behind so as to occupy deserts, unspoiled islands or the countryside.

At festivals, street performances are contingent upon receiving permission from the relevant local authorities that monitor movement and traffic flow within the city. Communication and safety arrangement are generally at odds with the acts performed by the street-artists. The signage, the maps reassure us: “You are indeed at a festival.” The festival is the temporary forum probably best tailored to the needs of contemporary creativity. Nonetheless it is imperative that we remain aware of the limitations of this artificial environment.

Otherwise, there remain other smaller forms, less visible, more diluted: a small platform, to draw a circle in chalk on the ground, to install a wire, to infiltrate the world of work, to define their own art space in the city in the vein of fairground artists who have constantly worked in that fashion. But once an artistic action goes beyond that which one finds on a cultural map, of the security perimeter labelled “Culture,” the artist transforms into an activist.

Nowadays artistic approaches overlap between the alternative scene and official venues.

The photograph reproduced below (ill. 4) is very representative of today’s cities. In this poster for an official exhibition of Maurizio Cattelan’s works, his mordant humour is neutralised as a result of it being formalised; a pixelated virus of space invaders who invaded the world’s cities. This questions the very relevance of art in contemporary society; an obsolete commercial emblem with an eighties retro charm and which could even become vintage, a street sign so as to grasp one’s whereabouts; a small plaque with a number probably related to electricity.

In short, this section of wall tells of the downright blurring of cultural, touristic, commercial and artistic domains—blurred to such an extent in fact that it engulfs the artist in the magma of the city-image, city-map.

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Ill. 4
BSL_08
Space Invaders

Basel, 2013
© Space Invaders

Traceability – a new World for future Artists and City-dwellers

The Map’s intensely weatherworn Ruins
Borges

The word “trace” is inherent in “traceability,” a theme figuring prominently in this edition of Klaxon. The notion of a “trace” is somewhat more complex than that of a “plan.” Because it suggests a link between the trait itself and reality. And, as we have remarked, this link has been missing for a long time.

Maps are undergoing something unprecedented, namely, the digital revolution. They are much less flattening. Nowadays we can navigate via a virtual map that represents nearly all the data-inputs from our surrounding reality. GPS is improving. We now have virtual maps in which we can observe our cities in terms of volume and even in terms of sound, in an enhanced form of reality.

It might well be that this augmented reality becomes a third space between the real and the map, in which our inputs move around with us.

In addition to satellites that hitherto enabled us to observe the earth from above, new forms of marking out the planet are emerging. Maps are no longer just in the hands of governments. We have been witnessing the introduction of Google-street maps covering the entire European landmass since 2006. We are moreover observing the emergence of shared or open source maps, that is to say maps that are drawn from information provided directly by citizens. This is the case with Waze—a community based traffic and navigation app for Android: those traveling by car send real-time information on their movements and traffic conditions. They redraw every few seconds an updated map of the city. Google has recently acquired Waze. This means that something is at stake. Yet our political institutions do not seem to react. Note in passing that the term “traceability” is not to be found in a French dictionary. It is just about tolerated by that bastion of the official authority on the French language—the Académie française. If ever proof was needed of the chronic gap between our fractured institutions and the real world.

Geolocalisation—the exact term—is in the throes of interconnecting the virtual and the real worlds. It might well be that this augmented reality becomes a third space between the real and the map, in which our inputs move around with us. The end of secret data. All kinds of maps are imaginable: maps outlining corruption, sexual desires. And, in real time.

It’s a double-edged sword: more freedom and more supervision.

Young artists are already aware of the potential offered by these tools. Some have invented sensory walks through urban areas, while others have devised new maps based on data submitted by residents. It’s deeply Situationist in approach, if we think back to psycho-geographical maps.

These new maps are without limits. The Waze user availing of a route that has yet not been navigated by someone else draws a line on the map that traces itself. We come across lines on maps without edges, as were to be observed in the early maps by the Greeks. We are facing an unfamiliar world. Not only might our relationship to urban space completely change but also the boundaries between private and public spheres as well. The very notion of the City might well be turned on its head. But this new phenomenon has yet to happen on a global scale.

The map reproduced hereafter (ill. 5) shows areas marked out by Google Street Views. The work of two young French artists discloses a world in which Africa and Siberia have practically disappeared from the face of the earth.

So, in effect our planet consists of two worlds.

One, an out-dated world in which our Android operating systems are of no use in guiding or assisting us. Cities in which our senses must remain keen. On the map of the world lit-up at night (ill. 6) , it’s that area plunged into darkness. That world without electricity, synaesthetic.

The other, a new world where we could evolve in a reality enhanced by copious sensory and geographic data. On the map of the world lit-up at night, it’s those areas illuminated, one in which electricity is omnipotent, yet so dependent.

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Ill. 5
Street-Views
Juliette Goiffon and Charles Beauté

Offset print
90,5 x 68 cm
2012
© Juliette Goiffon and Charles Beauté

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Ill. 6
Light pollution of the earth, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, based on DMSP data.

© Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon

For centuries, we have used body parts to measure dimensions in space and on construction sites—finger-length, a foot, arm-length and so on. That is what gave bygone architectural styles a human scale. Contemporary architecture, however, sometimes seems disproportionate. Gigantic towers overwhelm our human-scaled bodies. In the ultra-drawn cities, artists are endeavouring to move the lines. The art of working off-radar seems to be becoming a vital and defiant course of action against systemised control in urban environments.

To wrap up, I would like to propose three ways to foster an off-radar presence in the city of the 21st Century: In terms of urban pathways, we should develop our senses, a relation with our own physicality, flesh, body (if only just to know how to find one’s way about in case of power failure!) As for cultural tracks: draw new scenes of action, open and circular. And, finally concerning traceability: Occupy public virtual space so as to keep it uncontrollable: Occupy Maps!

bit.ly/1ylbPm2

BIOGRAPHY
Pauline de la Boulaye

Based in Brussels, Pauline de la Boulaye graduated in contemporary history (Paris), and now publishes regularly for Stradda, a French magazine dedicated to outdoor works, and for Journal des Expositions, France-Europe. She lectures at L’iselp (Superior Institute for the Study of Plastic Language) since 2012, and recently collaborated with the Superior School of Circus Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Since 1998, she has curated exhibitions, conferences and study visits for museums, cities as well as private and corporate collections. Her research explores the relationship between artistic practices and contexts (museum, circus, set design, public space), because the artistic creation process in itself interests her beyond disciplinary compartmentalisation. Her daily practice of dance influences her writing.

bit.ly/1zQRnrD

Photo : © RR.

ROUTE

Notes on Subjective Geography
Catherine Jourdan and Florent Lahache

Subjective Geography is the title given to a project that aspires to give its full freedom to a truant yet collective, rigorous yet distorted geography, through the medium of a map. The so-called “subjective” map is the result of collaborative effort between a group of local people and us—the artist, Catherine Jourdan and the graphic designer, Pierre Cahurel. It is then subsequently printed and put on public display on the various public notice boards throughout the cities involved. Since 2008, twelve European cities (including Nantes, Rennes, Luxembourg, Brive, Charleroi) have participated in this collective creation: To create a map of their own city as seen from the perspective of its residents.

In concrete terms, how do we make the maps? A few groups of city residents, established by the institution hosting the project (school, museum, local authority and so on) are invited, during the residency period, to come together to produce a collective image of their city. Equipped with blank sheets of paper, computers and recorders of every description, this transient group draws, reflects, speaks of, and defines the city from a postulated subjectivity, namely what they share in common.

The process isn't concerned per se with recording that which might represent an image of their urban surroundings, given we do not assume that such an image pre-exists the act of verbally articulating or drawing it. It is more a case of creating together a discursive image at once manual and verbal, working hand-in-hand successively and simultaneously. Upon completion of the task, this collective image is put on public display to instigate commentary, to serve as a representation to be deconstructed and enhanced.

If reality consists of only that which I perceive, then what is reality for the others?

Every Map is a Mental Construct

At the project's outset a form a solipsistic and somewhat naive concern plays out: “If reality consists of only that which I perceive, then what is reality for the others?” This general line of questioning has been linked to problem concerning space itself and city-life. Quasi naturally, these assumed the form of a map. There's nothing like a map to create an illusion of grasping all facets of reality, and with a single gesture at that. It is the ideal metaphor for intellectual drive; it presents the world in miniature, without smell or temperature, a conquered terrain that vies against the world of ideas!

In short, any map would ineluctably fail to hone in on the human dimension of the locality and ascribe people to unlived places.

And yet it is precisely from that object which yearns “to be everywhere and yet is nowhere” that we seek to create the map of “some-where”. This is an impossible position. It is from this tension we are trying to insert the “world” in the map and see what happens. This praxis inscribed itself socially and in haste assumed the moniker: subjective geography.

Subjective Geography – a Moniker

This concept is akin to an oxymoron or a tautology, depending on whether one assumes a common-sensical point of view or that of epistemological reflexivity. An oxymoron because geography stakes a claim on being objectifying: it produces an abstract point of view from which we can encompass the entire terrain. Essentially, a map doesn't convey any single individual’s perspective. In talking about “subjective geography” we inevitably enter a metaphoric sphere: the geometric layout brims with images, perceptions and meaningful anecdotes. The map is a discourse, not a chart. It is moreover a tautology, for when will we ever come across a cartographer convinced that his or her map is a facsimile of objective reality? Every map is but the product of a particular discourse and bears the trace of its creator.

Subjective geography is anti-literal; the meaning does not come to attach itself to the map.

Cartographic Collages

If the model functions—read to convince, to seduce—to explain the nature of the project, it’s not strictly speaking either about geography or subjectivity. The maps created are more akin to assemblage, collage of words, shapes, lines, and heterogeneous parts cohabiting a single sheet of paper. And these collages of discourses are not exactly subjective or individual. First of all, they are collective and pluralistic ventures. Creative processes bypass the polarities of objective image/subjective image. What actually unfolds in praxis are a series of collective spoken-drawn experiences. All are related to that which binds us in the imagination with others at a particular place. Beginning as a blank sheet, the map is that place where intangible relationships come and relate to each other, and where behind the scenes human hands are at play, pensive hands that communicate, write, hesitate, enhance, scratch out, spin, draw and negotiate lines. This mapping process is a chaotic concert whose score is written in its wake. This is why subjective geography is anti-literal; the meaning does not come to attach itself to the map, but instead to overflow, to stir, to swarm, and to stratify itself.

Sketching the Commonplace

The subjective map examines the matter from all sides with taking recourse to a distanced viewpoint: it is constructed “with” everybody’s point of view. The issue at stake is not the order of the terrain, but rather the value of its constituent sites: their moods, stories, and sensations. In availing of the cartographic censor as a loudhailer, the project delineates an authoritative stance—nobody’s points of view—, which it precisely sets out to undo. Because the map prescribes nothing: it allows the utterances to go their way. It does not solve problems, yet seeks instead to formulate them. It doesn’t answer to any other programme than to hear speak of the commonplace.

This commonplace it seeks to come to grips with is none other than “the city” that embodies it. This is primarily a pretext or a backing to propose an off-centre playground: here, we do not talk of ourselves, but of the city, and in speaking of the city, we talk about what we have in common with others. In this way, the transitional map is a third party, enabling us to formulate the manner in which various subjective approaches forge links.

A Documentary Game

The childlike appearance of maps—coloured, colourful, clumsy—highlight the understated nature of the relationship to the terrain. This graphic choice takes into account the playful dimension of the process: speaking of the city entails playing at mutually talking about it, in being the native conveyor for someone else—to speak of those places and localities which keep the city vibrant, cause distress, make us laugh, where it identifies us and from where we escape it—and the flight is no less significant than the enclosure. This rudimentary and multiple graphic bear signs of authorisation above all else it is the mark of an anti-authoritarian style.

Sheer elementary joy, namely the joy in regaining control over experiences that are not spoken of.

The maps are deliberately stripped of any semblance of earnestness—like that present in sociological discourse—which would be an impediment to finding other possibilities. That which is deposited during this speech-drawing process is nothing more than sheer elementary joy, namely the joy in regaining control over experiences that are not spoken of. In the praxis, the preferred method of expression of the participants is exclamatory: what's at stake here is not discovery but rather re-discovery.

Subjective Geography is more than an art project; we could call it a hybrid of the documentary genre: a cartographic, narrative and collective documentary.

bit.ly/1FTlkeC

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Making a map process
© Catherine Jourdan

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Making a map process
© Catherine Jourdan

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Making a map process
© Catherine Jourdan

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Making a map process
© Catherine Jourdan

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Making a map process: draft of the Saint-Avé map.
© Catherine Jourdan

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Indre. The City seen by kids
Map of Géographie subjective
© Catherine Jourdan

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Valenciennois
Map of Géographie subjective
© Catherine Jourdan

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Vieux-Condé. The City seen by its inhabitants.
Map of Géographie subjective
© Catherine Jourdan

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Luxembourg. The City seen by kids.
Map of Géographie subjective
© Catherine Jourdan

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Brive la gaillarde seen by inhabitants of Tujac
Map of Géographie subjective
© Catherine Jourdan

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Display of the map At ours. Rennes seen by kids from Blosne in a street of Rennes.
Map of Géographie subjective
© Catherine Jourdan

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Map of Charleroi seen by its inhabitants displayed in the City.
Map of Géographie subjective
© Catherine Jourdan

BIOGRAPHY
Catherine Jourdan and Florent Lahache

After a Master in Philosophy at University Paris X Nanterre in 2002 and some time spent teaching, Catherine Jourdan turned towards her own artistic practice: sculpture, installation, video, performance…. to invent new trajectories. Her last “artistic” project is Géographies subjectives, that she has led since 2009. In 2011, she got a Master in clinical psychopathology with an analytical orientation, and now works as a clinical psychologist. She shares her time between clinical listening and documentary practice. Florent Lahache teaches aesthetics at the Superior School of Fine Arts in Le Mans since 2007 and at Ateliers du Carrousel (Applied Arts‬ Museum of Paris) since 2011. Before that, he worked for five years at the cultural development department of Centre Georges Pompidou. He defended a thesis in 2012 about political thinking of Bertolt Brecht from his poetic production perspective. His research is about the political stake of modern and contemporary art, architecture, cinema and poetry as well as critical theory nowadays. He is also a translator, member of the editorial committee at Form[e]s Editions and he collaborates with artists and architects.

Photo : © RR.

REMARKABLE EVENT

Maps on an Unknown Scale
Speak of US that which is worthy to be counted recounted.
Stany Cambot
on behalf of Échelle Inconnue

The great hall of the École d’Architecture of Normandy was thronged, with talk of perhaps up to a hundred people. Some even say that members of the Renseignement Généraux [Crime Investigation Department] were in attendance. I was in such a state of panic to take notice of anything. In front of me, the jury. As president, the poet and playwright Armand Gatti was irritated to be there. “You understand,” he had told me days earlier, “I refused to carry arms when in the French Resistance. My first bomb attack was with an enema syringe! And you, you want to plant bombs! And what’s more, with the poor as targets!”

I was standing right there in the midst of my calques, those large sheets of tracing paper that I had hung up overnight. They met the requirement of the latest specifications by the relevant ministry in charge of issuing a degree in architecture: “Each student must present his or her project in the form of graphic documents (plan, section, façade and details) and to scale.” To what scale? Plan, section and façade of what? The document had failed to specify.

Furious, the head of the school strut about, scrutinising the calques upon which were printed mnemonic maps of Sarcelles—a commune in the northern suburb of Paris— created in conjunction with local residents, and others upon which were displayed plans to build explosive devices accompanied by video tutorials. If implemented, they might just create—in that truly inhuman plan of modernism in architecture—a breach wide enough from which possibilities might arise. At the bottom of each document was stated: “Échelle Inconnue”(Scale Unknown).

Échelle Inconnue: In itself it could have been considered a cartographic provocation for those who merely envisage maps as the world’s sole measure.

It was 1997. And thus a genuine example of an Anarchist Cook Book made official by the ministry happened to surface in the university library. Beyond recklessness and the demonstration of the absurdity of the prevalent norms, it was that driving urge to explode the plan from which we never departed, which remained at the core. Échelle Inconnue: it was as much a programme as the birth of a process of invention in beneficial ways to create urban space and of the intranquillisation of words and images by its pundits. Échelle Inconnue: In itself it could have been considered a cartographic provocation for those who merely envisage maps as the world’s sole measure. It was as much a provocation as a fundamentalist endeavour to re-consider the function of maps. Let's go back to the birth of this moniker in 1997, which was to become that of our group; it might suffice to shed some light upon that which we have been pursuing in the meantime.

In 1997, just two years after 1995 02 a muffled Paris May 68 still kindled throughout France, Italy, Great Britain and the United States. The 95-generation was a lost cause, if we don’t take into consideration those insurgent flower buds that erupted some five, eight or eighteen years later. Lost thanks to specialists in social movements and trade union practices whereby their representatives rushed into negotiations at various ministerial desks so as to later blow their trumpets with cries of: “We’re the victors”! Nobody was taken in.

The autumn of 1995 was to witness the emergence of significant social movements worldwide: In France, there were massive street protests in response to the Plan Juppé, measures which the then prime-minister Alain Juppé hoped to introduce to curb social programmes and spending. Ultimately, given the scale of the public backlash, he was forced to back-down. Concurrently, la Pantera rose to the fore in Italy, particulary with the formation of the Stalker group in Rome. England saw the Brixton riots while the “Million March” took place in Washington D.C. In Argentina, El Escrache rose to prominence, while African students went on strike and their Canadian counterparts joined in...

What, then, was the point in obtaining a degree in architecture—at that time the equivalent of a license to practice—and join the cohort of bigwigs entitled to build? None at all, if it wasn’t to work at the absurdity of it, to overturn the stylistic exercises and figures imposed by the latest reforms which were meant to ensure access on order to only those students capable of fulfilling quotas and complying with the conditions set by the construction market.

It’s obviously less the case that a map should call into question rather than exert blind fascination.

To standardise, to professionalise, to select, these were the retorts to the 95-generation. Such exertion to guard against the reappearance of a generation of students who might even call into question their practice, and who nowadays end up in competitive entrance examinations and prépas, those preparatory classes for the French Grandes Ecoles, for kids of the wealthy that we know. They had to start somewhere or other, and it’s by no means negligible if their initial attempts to control and standardise were carried out on graphic representations of inhabited space. Following upon the consequences of the class of 95, the ministry, teaching staff and weaselly students established—not without some pride—those objectives.

The urgency back then was to re-cross that savoir-faire, that know-how the conscription regime had earmarked for architects doing their military service, at least until such time as the wars of national liberation in Algeria and Vietnam erupted: tasks involving undermining the enemy, sabotage, the engineering corps. To affirm the possible benefits to be gained from disorder—provided it expressed the wishes of the populace—in strategic planning as the crow flies, of which the plan—namely, a map devised by an architect and urban planner—was the implement. To affirm once again the predominance of multiple re-presentations of space to its own standards, whose plan or scaled map consists of nothing more than inadequate, if dogged, assertions.

It’s obviously less the case that a map should call into question rather than exert blind fascination, the value of the certitude we attribute to it or of that peace of mind it provides—one which ill behoves our intelligence—in the guise of an image of a flat and finite world that is manageable given that it is measurable. Let us consider for an instant a map as a device; let us draw one up with Giorgio Agamben in such a fashion that it can solely serve the function for which it was originally conceived.

The hegemonic and modern map, as we know it, is a recent phenomenon. It first appeared in the eighteenth century from the ateliers of the French cartographer Cassini. Its then recently-developed technique involving a three-way correlation that “finally” enabled accurate measurements of distances and surface areas. King Louis XV commissioned this great topographical map of France, as he was anxious to know the exact dimensions of his kingdom. It was subsequently used by emperor Napoléon I to prepare the cadastral survey map of a nation comprised of small property owners reigning like minor monarchs juxtaposed to large estates. In passing, this cadastre or land registration survey remains to this days a regulation in effect and a cardinal document depicting both an image and an architectural schema. To outline a city in this fashion, in terms of plans or projects, was to consider and reproduce it as though habitable, a domain as such overruled be it by a landowner, a mayor or a president. Those who did not exercise power, society’s “have-nots,” those on the move, the itinerants, travellers or passers-by were thus excluded.

These maps are by no means paltry, and do have their uses. They are used, and often as a matter of necessity, to for surveying purposes and measurements. Maps are still useful in war as well as for those leading us into them. Though asymmetric conflicts and wars of resistance have jeopardised that image of a fixed or a flat city or territory, preferring instead an aqueous medium in which “the guerrillero swims like a fish in water.”

We ought to draw other maps, not so as to rig power or to mitigate its “accidental” blindness but instead to disarm it.

Such conventional maps only transmit that which is measurable. And it is indeed fortuitous that some clandestine networks or areas of our daily lives escape its radar. Its apparent objectivity effectively renders it a disturbing fetish of the truth. Nonetheless we take a risk by continuing to fetishize maps and to consider them as revealing the truth about the world in which we live. Just as with figures, maps and plans would not deceive. Who would have dared to question a point of view so elevated as that of a bird, a monarch—a satellite in contemporary terms—, in other words, of God above?

It's by no means a matter of setting a bird’s eye view against a perspective view, let alone of playing along with the notion of creating a sub-class of “tangible maps.” But rather to concur that these maps, and hence these plans and urban projects, are not of our making and are merely instruments of an amputated form of OUR existence, a domain which is not ours, but instead an image modelled on its proprietors.

Maps would require restoration and the paramount use of map legend, so as to overcome the representation of a computable world.

We ought to draw other maps, not so as to rig power or to mitigate its “accidental” blindness—which we were able to give credence to—but instead to disarm it. To produce such maps that state US without THEM. To leave them the bleak lands of blank paper of Google Maps, of the land survey registrars, of Cassini. Maps that will speak of US. Not the national, patriotic or even partisan WE, but instead an assembly, even if provisional, of every I. It’s “to fight, for the city we dream of and not that one that features on the cadastre, the one that figures therein; hence, perhaps, the advent of mega words” which this group of artists and architects in Échelle Inconnue has worked upon ever since.

Our maps subsequently sought to avoid the flattening of the world as in Euclidian geometry, choosing over Cassini the forgotten cartographic paths mapping, which above all else render a map a tale of an inhabited domain—even if by the supernatural. Maps would require restoration and the paramount use of map legend, so as to overcome the representation of a computable world. In other terms, “that which is worthy of being recounted.” In this matter, our forefathers were five hundred priests in the Spain of the eighteenth century. But therein begins another tale.

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Les Murs-mûres de l'Argonne
Échelle Inconnue
Orléans, 1999-2000

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This picture and the next are traces of four months of work with the sons (fourteen to twenty years old) of Argonne, a city that newspapers describe with burned cars and broken windows. Nine cards, some posters and an installation to tell the neighbourhood through their eyes.
Farid has lived in the neighbourhood for many years and now works as a facilitator. In a kind of dizziness, he describes his life and work places which overlap, people who inhabit them, as places where he is perpetually surrounded by his colleagues, the “young ones”, his family. One place yet allows him to step back, consider things with a perspective; his car that he sometimes takes for long drifts, elsewhere.
© Échelle Inconnue

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Les Murs-mûres de l'Argonne
Échelle Inconnue
Orléans, 1999-2000

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Saïd has no particular places he likes. He lets himself go with the flow through chance encounters; there's only one reference, the axis, sacred, which organises the rest. An axis that passes through the family home and the mosque, with a pivot being the carpet on which he prays. Carpet, home, mosque, and it becomes a game of equivalences which is established between the three places and Mecca. A game that draws a map of the sacred, which marks the territory of men and of angels, where dogs are not allowed. As they would frighten the angels.
The composition is based upon oriented carpet, such as prayer mats, reviving the original meaning of these objects which have become everyday objects: magical space, hierarchical representation of the universe (God, man, natural elements...) but beyond, these objects reorganise and reorient the universe, creating equivalences between the place where they settle and sacred and holy places. At the time for praying, when they are put on the ground, the Cartesian orientation of houses fades, the world changes direction. Making maps according to this image was also a way to call those that we have not yet been able to represent though they have apparently observed us: angels.
© Échelle Inconnue

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VEO
Échelle Inconnue
Canteleu, 2002

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Image of a nighbourhood of Canteleu seen by its women. Interactive cartographic scenography.
© Échelle Inconnue

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La Question du « Où » : le corps cartographié [The “where” question : the mapped body]
Échelle Inconnue

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If tattoos were a map on skin, what would they map?
© Échelle Inconnue

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La Question du « Où » : quand la ville était une maison [The “where” question : when the city was a house]
Échelle Inconnue

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© Échelle Inconnue

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La Cité de Nulle-Part : « d'où partons-nous ? » [The nowhere City : “from where do we start?”]
Échelle Inconnue

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Pascal Provi responds with “The Road to Oblivion.” A journey which takes him from Mutant to his room, twice a day. A journey with a break on his "thinking bench" in the gardens of the City Hall, opposite the kindergarten. A bench at the edge of the “dating boulevard” where he looks at passing dogs and masters, whom he ends up recognising. A journey that bypasses the refectory of the home filled with hybrid monsters "piranhas-vultures." A journey that ends in a bedroom, his own, in which he locks himself to do everything at once: watching TV, listening to radio, smoking, drinking and writing, an activity that he has just rediscovered. "I stayed for years without writing a word, and then I met a girlfriend, I write her every day up to two double copies". In his world, there is a text, a quatrain of Omar Khayyam that speaks of the harshness of wine and life, read in a book; In Praise of Drunkenness.
© Échelle Inconnue

BIOGRAPHY
Stany Cambot

Visual artist, architect and set designer, Stany Cambot makes urban installations and interventions and he directs films. First attracted by living art, he created set designs for theatre, then for exhibitions. Later he worked alongside Armand Gatti with whom he created urban set designs. In 1998, he founded Échelle Inconnue and now leads its projects around the notions of the City, sites and their representations. He dedicates his work to minority, alternative and emerging urbanities as well as populations that are not taken into account or discriminated because of their minority way of life. In parallel, he contributes to specialised and academic publications, developing his own theory about urban, artistic and political questions.

Photo : © Julie Bernard.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

This Sea is Mine
Dictaphone Group

This Sea Is Mine is a site-specific performance by Dictaphone Group that explored the concepts of access to the sea and public space in the city through Beirut’s seafront.

We met Abu Hussein when we were sitting once at Abu Adal’s kiosk in “Dalieh” in Beirut. He told us that he is one of the ten fishermen who were evicted from their sea-front rooms that were located under the Grand Café, a café on the southern coast of Beirut. These fishermen had been using these rooms for the past forty years, as long as the café had been there. But the café did not use to look like it does today. Ever since its owners “upgraded” it in 2010, they saw the presence of these fishermen as undesirable, as a nuisance to the new image the café was trying to portray. And like that, the fishermen were evicted, given $4,000 compensation each, and moved to new fishermen rooms in Dalieh.

Today, the fishermen community of Dalieh is facing a similar battle. They recently received a lawsuit to evict the houses that they had informally built since the 1950s. The fishermen’s eviction signals a planned private real-estate development project in Dalieh.

Since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, Beirut has been undergoing diverse forms of control over public space.

Each location on the coast of Beirut has a different story. Accounts circulate about how the sea is being gradually closed off from the public. Studies are reported about how a law, or an exception to a law, or the trespassing of a law, is used by the political elite to enable the construction of big hotels and private sea resorts with exclusive access.

In fact, since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, Beirut has been undergoing diverse forms of control over public space. It has particularly witnessed the gradual disappearance of coastal lands accessed by the public, which has been happening through a legalization of the de-facto privatization of the coastal line that occurred during the war years, and even before.

It is in this context that the project This Sea Is Mine was conceived. During the journey, we stopped at each resort and revealed its land ownership, the laws that govern it, and the practices of its users. The project relied in its development on fieldwork, collaboration with several fishermen, collection of oral history as well as legal texts.

This Sea is Mine
Dictaphone Group

Film, 2013, 10’38’’.
© Dictaphone Group

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Alongside the site-specific performance, the outcome of the project was a printed booklet

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that includes all research findings and oral narratives, as well as the produced maps. The booklet was distributed to the local fishermen community and in many venues in Beirut. It was also used as a tool during the performance.

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Map of Beirut's Seafront. Ownership and Private Exploitation
Dictaphone Group

From This Sea is Mine, booklet, Beirut, 2013.
© Dictaphone Group

Beirut dwellers today still lay claim to a limited number of open areas in the city. These are used as “public” spaces in the sense that they are accessed freely and allow for an unconfined range of social activities to occur. Access to these spaces is secured through social and communal agreements through which their uses are organized.

One such case is the “Dalieh” of Beirut. Dalieh is the name of a large piece of sea-front land, which however is made up of several large private plots. Since the 1940s, this site has been declared an un-built land property of several families.

Yet “Dalieh of Beirut” is used today as one of the main public spaces in the city. It boasts two fishing ports and several informal seashore kiosks with a stream of visitors enjoying the sea, picnicking, bathing, and strolling.  It is a main destination for swimmers and divers alike who come from different parts of Beirut to exercise their passion for jumping off of high cliffs into the Mediterranean waters–a practice that has been taking place there for ever. It also includes a variety of social groups, such as Beiruti fishermen, suburb dwellers, Iraqi refugees, Syrian migrant workers and refugees, and others.

Dalieh puts into question the modern accepted notion of public space that is tied to the state.

Although Dalieh is historically made up of plots privately owned by several Beiruti families, there are countless stories that recount that since the 1950s, it had been used as a renowned picnic/outing destination, getting very busy on holidays and weekend. Up until the 1970s, families gathered in it on Fridays, bringing their food, beverages, arghileh and a family member who played the Oud, Bozoq or Tabla. The activity referred to the practice of making a picnic/outing in places of promenade/picnic/stroll. Additionally, up till the 1960s, Dalieh as well as Ramlet el-Baida beach were hosting sites for the yearly celebrations whereby residents hailing from different neighbourhoods in Beirut would come together to march to the sea-front; the women would serve their traditional Beiruti dish, while the kids would fly their kites.

Describing how public space is practiced in Dalieh, it is important to understand it as the space to be shaped by the social groups that occupy it, and as an outcome of communal practices. Dalieh is specifically interesting because it puts into question the modern accepted notion of public space that is tied to the state through the attribution of designated spaces in the city as “park” or “garden”.

Dalieh opened new possibilities for understanding public space in Beirut as spaces of negotiation through daily interactions, and hence unpredictable by definition. This unpredictability was also a main feature of the performance itself.

Somebody once told us that This Sea Is Mine is a never-ending performance. Today, we wonder if the loss of Dalieh will mean a forced end to the performance.

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This Sea is Mine
Dictaphone Group

Picture from the performance, 2013.
© Dictaphone Group

Dictaphone Group was founded with the aim of marrying urban research to live art performances. The idea behind this collaboration is to popularize academic research by inviting audiences to build a relationship with the studied space and by making action-based work, which can be considered as a political action. This is perhaps why the performance of “This Sea Is Mine” was described by the media as a “protest.”

The premise of the performance was that a group of people, compromising a small group of audience, a fisherman and a performer enter in a boat the private resorts in Beirut and attempt to swim there for free.

By placing the body of the performer and those of the audience in places where they are unwelcome, this live action turned into a protest claiming.

Armed by ancient laws that explained that the shore as far as where the water reaches is in fact public domain, we crossed the floating borders around private resorts and swam for free where others were swimming in return of over-priced day entries that ensure that only the rich and the elite are able to enjoy the sea. By placing the body of the performer and those of the audience in places where they are unwelcome, this live action turned into a protest claiming back the sea and the stolen public space in the city.

This interactive piece offers to the audience the opportunity to rebuild a lost connection to the sea, outside of the dominant experience of private resorts, to listen to the stories of the older fisherman who spent his whole life there, and to experience intimate stories, about other fishermen who were born by the sea and suffered from various threats of eviction. The audience also shared stories they know and the performance kept growing as we added these stories to the script.

Those who experienced the show were moved by different aspects of it. Some were angered when they heard how private companies and the political elite slowly took over the seashore and how they tricked families into selling their lands. Some fantasized about blowing up the high-rise buildings that block the sea view. Some expressed joy that they were able to see the city from another perspective, from the sea.

The project opened up a broader discussion in the city about public space. It happened at a time when other initiatives with similar concerns emerged in the city. The performance has since been turned into a sound piece that is available for everyone to download and experience. 03

Another version of this text was published in The Sea Is This Way, a special edition of ArteEast Quarterly e-zine.

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The edition was guest edited by Dictaphone Group and involved various contributions from artists, activists and researchers working on the right to access the sea in the Arab world.

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BIOGRAPHY
Dictaphone Group

Dictaphone Group is a Beirut-based research and performance collective that creates live art events based on multidisciplinary study of space. It is a collaborative project initiated by live artist Tania El Khoury and architect/urbanist Abir Saksouk. Together along with various collaborators such as performer and producer Petra Serhal, they have been creating site-specific performances informed by research in a variety of places like a cable car, a fisherman’s boat, and a discontinued bus. The aim of these projects is to question our relationship to the city, with a focus on public space, and the goal of its redefinition.

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Photo : © Dictaphone Group.

STROLL

Forbidden City
Vjekoslav Gašparović

Half of the Bay of Pula, on the Croatian coast, has always 04 been hidden from the inhabitants of the city. Being military zones, the northern and southern part of the bay have been excluded from civil maps of Pula. Excluded from maps, hidden from the sight, and forbidden to approach, they always remained outside of the perception and outside of the idea of the city of Pula. After the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1813-1918), the Italian Fascist government (1918-1945), the Anglo-American Administration (1945-1947), the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1947-1991), and the current government of the Republic of Croatia (1991-present), the army recently has started abandoning the mentioned territory.

The modern development of Pula begins in 1859, when it was chosen for the main naval base of Austria-Hungary.

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Map of Pula, year 1961—the northern coast of the Bay is hidden by text (top left), while the southern coast and the peninsula of Muzil is left outside of the map (middle left).

Meanwhile a new reason appeared for keeping the inhabitants away from the territory, and the territory outside of the perception of the citizens—the privatization of the vast coastal land. 150 years of military presence left the coastal areas very well preserved, with almost intact nature and a lot of facilities. Obviously, the interests in land are high, and the privatization process is planed to be done under the project called “Brijuni Rivijera”

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—a tourist resort development.

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Map of Pula, year 2013—both the north (bottom left) and south (bottom right) side of the Bay are outside of the map or hidden by text.

© Grupa pulska

The activities of Pulska grupa 05 started in 2006 with the organization of an architectural workshop, a book about opening Pula’s shore 06 and a public walk) through the closed northern part of the Bay of Pula preceded by the publication of a map of that forbidden zone in the daily newspaper Glas Istre. 07

Pulska grupa is an informal group of architects based in Pula, working on recognition, re-appropriation and defense of common urban spaces.

Katarina 06 – opening Pula's shore.

Glas Istre is the main local daily newspaper in Istra, Croatia.

In 2006 the publication of such content was still possible. Since then the local ruling party IDS 08 gradually took complete control over the newspaper, which now serves for propaganda of politicians, golf, tourist developments, and projects such as “Brijuni Rivijera.”

The ruling party in Istra (IDS) is unaltered since 1991.

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Public walk in 2007, more than 500 citizens entered the area for the first time in their life.

© Grupa pulska

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Map of the north side of the Bay (Valelunga, Monumenti, Katarina) which preceded and announced the public walk, published in the daily newspaper Glas Istre.

© Grupa pulska

One of the few possibilities left to citizens to show reality is the production of maps.

Of course, the control of media is essential for influencing the attitude of citizens towards activities and projects planned by the authorities. So, one of the few possibilities left to citizens to show reality is the production of maps. In 2008 Pulska grupa made the “Red Plan,” and afterwards the “Plan Mediterraneo.” In 2009 the map of the southern part of the bay and the peninsula of Muzil 09 was produced, which was published in the first issue of the newspaper produced and self financed by the Civil Initiative for Muzil. The formation of civil initiative and publication of self financed newspaper opened new possibilities for sharing information about the city in order to change the perception of the city itself, the territory and activities going on.

Muzil – a peninsula on the southern side of the Bay of Pula, currently under threat to be privatized for tourist real-estate interest

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The Red Plan of Pula, 2008, a map of crisis showing invisible, hidden or marginalized activities going on in the city, as well as hidden territories.

© Grupa pulska

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Plan Mediterraneo, 2008, showing illegal and informal activities going on in ex-military zones in and around the city of Pula, with the capacity of changing the destined future of mono-functional tourist developments of the territory.

© Grupa pulska

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Map of the southern cost of the Bay, and the peninsula of Muzilcurrently under threat to be privatized as a tourist resort with a golf course on top of it, as part of the project “Brijuni Rivijera”.

© Grupa pulska

Other activities of Pulska grupa include illegal interventions, since legal ones are prohibited by the authorities, such as the “1st segment of new Pula’s waterfront,” or the reconstruction of the Bridge to Valelunga, as well as the production of architectural plans of military facilities within the forbidden territory of Muzil. The plans were named “Invisible buildings,” and published in order to be used by students of faculties of architecture in Zagreb and Madrid, as to engage students and institutions in current problems within the city.

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1st segment of new Pula waterfront

Illegal intervention as an appeal to authorities to start regarding the area as a part of the city.
2007

© Grupa pulska

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Reconstruction of the Bridge to Valelunga

Illegal intervention as a sign that citizens are able to develop the city without the approval and support of local authorities.
2009

© Grupa pulska

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Students of the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb visiting the forbidden peninsula of Muzil, 2010.

© Grupa pulska

Čistina (Clearance)
Vjekoslav Gašparović

Autobiographical documentary.
08'32"
2011
© Vjekoslav Gašparović

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BIOGRAPHY
Vjekoslav Gašparović

Vjekoslav Gašparović, born in Pula in 1980, graduated at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb in 2007. He collaborated with the theatre company BadCo., the research institute Platforma 9,81, the performance group Montažstroj. He is a member of the informal group of architects Pulska grupa, Civil initiative for Muzil “Volim Pulu” and Praksa Cooperative. He also studied Film and TV directing at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb 2013‐2014.

Photo : © RR.

NEIGHBOURHOOD

A Bundle of Keys
La Cambre — Urban Space
Adrien Grimmeau

Some years ago Raymond Balau, professor of “urban space,” would visit the port of Ghent with one of his students, Roberta Gigante. She fell in awe of twelve gigantic steel tubes weighing several dozen tonnes. After going through various administrative procedures, she was allowed free access to the tubes, and even permitted to move them around if needed. They were to form the basis for OrganOOn, a monumental organ created with the help of amplifiers of resonant frequencies. During the presentation of the work during the Electrified Festival in 2010

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some spectators stood for an hour in front of the pipes so as the experience the sound first-hand. While listening to Balau introducing the department of Espace urbain, one of the seventeen faculties that make up La Cambre, the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels [ENSAV] in Brussels, we realized that this is what it’s all about, namely, moments.

Each work is contingent upon a particular situation: for the students to be sensitive.

It is though workshops at the ateliers in the Espace urbain department enabled one to obtain the keys to nearly all those highly unusual places conducive to giving rise to works of art. For nearly twenty years now, Balau, just as its founder Jean Gilbert, have been responsible for running it. “One of the primary tasks of the atelier is to gain access to sites. To obtain playgrounds.” Thanks to these immersions, students learn to decipher an environment: this entails working on site, or from experience gained there. To use the space.

The latest exploit at the atelier has been literally to obtain the keys to the Bruxelles-Congrès station 10 for a month’s residency for ten students, which closed with a weekend-long exhibition. In March 2014, bæk'steɪdʒ [backstage] provided the students sufficiently lengthy time to come to terms with the space beyond mere appearances, and to subsequently place them in a position to make a series of proposals. Most of which, simple though they may seem, required negotiations with Infrabel, the state-owned company managing the Belgian rail network. Simon Johannin transformed the lighting there by covering the neon lights with red filters; Chiara Colombi had a double-bassist enter into a dialogue with the trains passing through the tunnel; Florent Blein concretised memories of those living in the vicinity by means of a series of monochrome objects scattered around the neighbourhood. Each work is contingent upon a particular situation: for the students to be sensitive, and able to make their individual backgrounds resonate through that encounter.

Bruxelles-Congrès bit.ly/1BjYI73 a rarely used small railway station located in Brussels’ city centre, has—under the banner “Congrès”—become the focal point for various cultural projects, in a similar vein to those at the station at Bruxelles-Chapelle, under the auspices of the Association Recyclart.

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[bæk'steɪdʒ]
Simon Johannin

Presentation ending a residence at Atelier d'Espace Urbain at Brussels-Congrès station, March 2014.

© Raymond Balau

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[bæk'steɪdʒ]
Florent Blein

Pictural. Presentation ending a residence at Atelier d'Espace Urbain at Brussels-Congrès station, March 2014.

© Raymond Balau

From Infra-thin to the Superstructure

Currently, twenty-six students are divvying up five years of training, under the tutelage of Raymond Balau, Toma Muteba Luntumbue and Cédric Noël. It’s a small department, thus enabling in-depth dialogue and follow-up on the ground. “I’m often asked what disciplines does the atelier cover. Urban Planning? Public Art? Street Art? None of the afore-mentioned, even if we address these issues critically. I tell them to come to a jury session; then they will understand immediately.” For want of a jury, Balau handed me a series of essays. “In final year, essay-work is the cornerstone. This is a reflective expansion of their artistic folio. We really insist upon an acute approach.”

On average, three students complete the cycle annually. Last year, Sybille Deligne, Lodewijk Heylen and David Zagari did so. In her dissertation, Lumineuse vision du monde [Bright Vision of the World], Sybille compared the approach to light in antiquity to her own experiences of luminous phenomena. Her praxis is immaterial. In conjunction with her classmate David Zagari, she created the performance Les Porteurs

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for the Tuned City Festival 2013. They walked around Brussels, carrying a canvas bag that concealed small speakers. Each time they passed through radio waves emitted by a GSM network, they amplified the sound of the frequency that is usually inaudible.

Lodewijk Heylen’s work

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also functions as an eye-opener, but its very physicality is the complete antithesis of the previous example. Fascinated by motorways, he surveyed them, studied them, and visited the control areas. When Toma Muteba Luntumbue instructed him to build his own motorway, he took his tutor at his word: Instead of creating a new network, he decided to construct a motorway one meter in length. Concrete Evidence: 1m exists today thanks to efforts of many intermediaries, notably the Geert Verbeke Foundation. A kind of paradoxical monument, sculpture in scale and functional, yet covering such a short distance that one can only discover it by foot, closer than ever. The work will presently 11 be recreated for a year in a park in Berlin.

In April 2015.

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Concrete Evidence: 1 m
Lodewijk Heylen

Reconstruction at a one meter scale of a highway.
Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke, 2013.

© Alexandra Bertels

Hyper-body

The atelier’s bundle of keys is sizable. It opens many a door both within and beyond inner-city areas, especially in places one would not visit. Moreover, it offers methodological and theoretical keys to accompany personal reflection. Through encounters with spaces and people, students nurture a view of the world whose purpose is not specifically centred on the city: this is the essence of it. Intangible waves or motorways, for example, become the axes for multidisciplinary artistic reflection, whose strength resides in finding its corresponding form depending on the context. It’s a case of activating our five senses, our individual memories and those of the site, to unearth stories. To develop a sense of receptiveness. The works produced at the atelier might well involve performance, sculpture, literature... They are often intangible, and are short-lived most of the time.

Through encounters with spaces and people, students nurture a view of the world whose purpose is not specifically centred on the city: this is the essence of it.

David Zagari, the third graduate student last year, made a deep impression during bæk'steɪdʒ at the train station Bruxelles-Congrès. He placed an organic mass created by a dozen bodies—those of his classmates, traveling through space and swallowing up the obstacles. The work is a hyper-body, a concept developed by David after reading Bernard Stiegler and his economy of contribution. Trained as a dancer, David seeks to interact with or impinge upon bodies in public space. Thus, his intervention ICI TRAVAIL consisted simply of printing the names of the building site workers on the canvas covers that marked it off.

On asking Balau what has changed over the last twenty years in the atelier, he instantly replied: digital technology. Yet he described in great detail the fear of the majority of his students concerning the city being privatized and under constant surveillance; it was more a case of depersonalisation being the issue. Well that’s it, the crux of the atelier. Irrespective of whether the works are material or otherwise, site-specific or not, ephemeral or durable, they are the result of a profound immersion by future artists in the hotbed of urban life.

bit.ly/15Si5HH

bit.ly/12rtf3N

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Affixes
David Zagari

Performance in the frame of [bæk'steɪdʒ].
Brussels-Congrès station, March 2013.

© Marion Ellena

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Affixes
David Zagari

Performance in the frame of [bæk'steɪdʒ].
Brussels-Congrès station, March 2013.

© Mélanie Peduzzi

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ICI TRAVAIL
David Zagari

Intervention on construction tarps.
Brussels, rue de Flandre, 2011.

© David Zagari

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ICI TRAVAIL
David Zagari

Intervention on construction tarps.
Brussels, Boulevard Anspach, 2011.

© David Zagari

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ICI TRAVAIL
David Zagari

Intervention on construction tarps.
Place Rouppe, Bruxelles, 2011.

© David Zagari

BIOGRAPHY
Adrien Grimmeau

Adrien Grimmeau graduated in Art History at Free University of Brussels, and now curates contemporary and modern art exhibitions: EXPLOSITION. The Art of Graffiti in Brussels (Musée d'Ixelles, 2011), Ferdinand Schirren and his Imaginary Gardens (Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2012), Common Body (Anciens Abattoirs in Mons, 2013), Bonom, Lame Monkey (Iselp, 2014) and Anthropocosmos. Displaced Sights (Maison de la Culture of the Namur Province, 2014). He is the author of several essays and articles, in particular on urban art (Outside ! The Graffiti in Brussels, CFC Editions, 2011). He is now artistic programmer at L’iselp.

Photo : © N. Gruaux.

Klaxon
(When Art Lives in Town)

Editorial Director: Benoit Vreux.
Chief Editor: Antoine Pickels.
Copy Editor: Charlotte David.
Graphic and interactive design: Émeline Brulé.
Translation: John Barrett.
Production: Cifas (International Centre for Training in Performing Arts).
With the support of Commission communautaire française de la région de Bruxelles-Capitale and Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.

Have collaborated to this issue
Stany Cambot, Pauline de la Boulaye, Dictaphone Group, Vjekoslav Gašparović, Adrien Grimmeau, Catherine Jourdan, Florent Lahache, Antoine Pickels, Benoit Vreux.

Video and photographic credits: Guide psychogéographique de Paris : Collection FRAC Centre, Orléans. Atlas à l’usage des artistes et des militaires: Estate Marcel Broodthaers. Trisha Brown Roof Piece: Babette Mangolte. Space Invaders: Space Invaders. Street Views : Juliette Goiffon and Charles Beauté. Pollution lumineuse de la terre: Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon. Pauline de la Boulaye : DR. All illustrations “Tracing the Commonplace”: Catherine Jourdan. Catherine Jourdan and Florent Lahache : RR. All illustrations “Maps on an Unknown Scale”: Échelle Inconnue. Stany Cambot : Julie Bernard. Photos and video “This Sea is Mine”: Dictaphone Group. Photos “Forbidden City”: Pulska grupa. Čistina : Vjekoslav Gašparović. Vjekoslav Gašparović: RR. [bæk'steɪdʒ] : Raymond Balau. Concrete Evidence: 1m : Alexandra Bertels. Affixes : Marion Ellena and Mélanie Peduzzi. ICI TRAVAIL : David Zagari. Adrien Grimmeau : N. Graux.

Responsible Publisher: Benoit Vreux, Cifas asbl, 46 rue de Flandre, 1000 Bruxelles

ISSN : 2295-5585