I and Us

I and Us Project Evens/January 200 2

ŠCampement Urbain

I and Us In a good many major cities, both belonging to the community and being acknowledged by the community are the basic conditions of any kind of sustainable existence. Such conditions are exacerbated in so-called "problem" neighbourhoods, involving, as they do, similar patterns of behaviour, single models, and conformity.

This subordinate type of behaviour has an effect on the specific nature of human conduct in its varying forms, as well as on life choices. The acceptance of unifying models comes up against the needs and requirements of individual destinies. All attempts at being different give rise to rejection, ostracism, and exclusion. What we might call a solitude of consequence, rather than of experience, becomes the process whereby the I is done away with by the WE.

Challenge of the artistic project The intent of Campement Urbain is to create, within an area of great urban tension, a special place available to all and sundr y, and under the patronage-and protection-of one and all. A place that is extremely useless, extremely fragile and non-productive. A place for each and every person, but a place that is also shared by all. A place open to everyone, where people can step away from the community under the protection of the community. A place for han ging out and getting together but a "one-seater", as it were, where people can sample the attractions of solitude. A place of nothingness, where you are with yourself, where you can think about yourself, within yourself. A spiritual place, removed from anything religious.

The contemplation of an I possible in the US: a new public place.

Site of the project: Sevran, Les Beaudottes neighbourhood Sevran is in the Seine Saint-Denis department (Ile-de-France), a city with a population of 50,000 located between the outer Greater Paris suburbs and the city itself, on line B of the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport RER metropolitan and regional rail system. Sevran is one of those F rench cities which, over the past 30 years, has boasted the fastest urban growth in the countr y. The relatively recent Les Beaudottes neighbourhood, constructed between 1975 and 1990, is built around the RER station and is home to hundreds of inhabitants. In the past few years, the local population has become conspicuously impoverished and undermined; social problems have stigmatized the neighbourhood, which is now lived in by nothing more than a captive population, often of foreign extraction. The various problems came to a head in the summer of 2000, with night after

night of city riots, in which vehicles, a shopping mall, and public property were set fire to. In April 2001, a new, leftwing city administration, headed by a 30-year-old mayor, took over from the previous rightwing city council. This new team, which is multicultural to boot, has become deeply involved in the so-called problem neighbourhoods, and is favourably disposed--in principle--to the Urban Encampment project.

Participation: pressure and desire for an artistic project seen as a social act The Campement Urbain proposal can only be carried through if the potential users--neighbourhood residents, and their associative and political representatives--appropriate, assume and manage the project on a day-to-day basis.

This will involve collective discussion and construction aimed at defining the project in some detail, along with its location, and the way it will be managed and maintained.

Campement Urbain proposes a collective involvement of the groups concerned by introducing them to the project and its goals, and emphasizing the following points: 1/ The fragility of the project which can only be set up , to last, if there is shared and sustained responsibility on the part of all concerned.

2/ The profound uselessness of the project , which does not fulfil any need, which in turn renders any specific appropriation absurd, and sets it up as a truly gratuitous gesture, open to the particular wishes of one and all.

3/ The paradox of a place off the beaten track , favouring individual isolation, acting as the hub of collective attention.

4/ The chance for everyone to sample a certain fullness from nothingness.

Fragility as make-believe Beginnings of a task in the form of questions What is a space hanging on a thread?

Can you sit or lie down in it?

Can you see the sky in it?

Is the light hot or cold?

Is the space translucent or opaque?

Do you go there on your own?

Does it look like someone?

Do you open it with a key?

Can it be used day and night?

Can it be broken when you feel like it?

Can you grow your own garden in it?

Can it solve anything?

Is it the treasure?

Does it have a soul?

Is it non-reproducible?

Is it to feel things in?

Does beauty come from light?

Is emotion dangerous?

What is presence?

What is a dog's life?

Is it looked after by everyone?

Is it the symbol of not hing or something tenuous?

Does it have speed?

Is it in suspension?

Does it have a language?

Should you point at it?

Where are the gods?

Is my I you?

When it's broken is it lost?

Can we give it a name?

Is uselessness a luxury?

Is fragility the last word in strength?

When you break something do you destroy it?

...

Can it be achieved?

Campement Urbain For this project, the CAmpement urbain variable-geometry collective is made up of: RÊgis Biecher , graphic designer Sylvie Blocher , visual artist François Daune , town-planner/architect Josette Faidit , sociologist Ursula Kurz , landscape architect Urban Encampment is a group set up--with variable geometry--in 1999, advocating the decompartmentalization of each one of its members from his or her own discipline. In compliance with its commitments, the Urban Encampment production stems from "non-specialized" work, where the admixture of praxis and knowledge (non-hierarchized) combines with the contributions of local inhabitants and figures, and collectively prompts a temporary experimentation with "treasures of nothings", like new kinds of urban fictions.

Campement Urbain

Not a promised land but the delights of roaming