Words and action | From [la rue de] la République
Project in progress [1] | Martine Derain | 2004-2008
I «discovered» the rue de la République about four years ago: a shock.
The muted violence of walled-up doors. Apartments rendered uninhabitable by their owners, they were said to have been «ransacked». Dark and dirty staircases, public areas abandoned... I made this discovery during a militant action with Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous [2]. When this association, of which I am now a member, was alerted by inhabitants who feared they would be expelled from their lodgings. An American investment fund, Lone Star, had just bought 1,300 apartments in the district. One after the other the rentpayers received a letter informing them of the end of the rental agreement. I climbed each building, dozens and dozens of almost empty buildings, met each family, said to each one, that they were not alone, that «No !» it is not a private affair between the leaseholder and the rentpayer, nor a question of the sacred rights of ownership. It concerned the town, the whole town.
Institutional violence: the refurbishment of the street was included in the renovation programme for the town centre, widely supported by public funding. « I do not wish that the 600 families be rehoused on site. The new owner seems to be following a policy that we agree with... » declared however the Deputy Mayor, responsible for habitation and housing [3].
Finally the violence of the ‘mediators’ of the new owner : «You will go into the northern districts, that's where you belong!». To think poorly of the town by opposing a new centre and the immediate periphery, new and previous inhabitants, stigmatise the suburbs once again...
And then an immense anger: single women, workers, the unemployed, the aged, to whom elementary rights and the right to live where they chose were, quite simply, denied. People with hurt feelings whom discussions denigrated, rendered illegitimate: «We should have stayed in the heritage property with controlled rent. For myself, that's what I have thought since the beginning. We fully want to be : the renovations, we want to benefit from them too. We want to benefit from everything that is being done to improve day-to-day living. I don't understand why we were accepted when it was a rather abandoned area and then when everything is going to be good, we're undesirable?» says Monique Roussel indignantly [4].
One territory always echoes another territory. Since the beginning of my activity I have chosen to work and create with public space. This choice necessitates a political involvement in my activity. How can a project exist in this space, the paradoxical place of hospitality, with no desire for the other, for encounters? I experienced this involvement during a three-year workshop/exhibition centre, La Compagnie [5], in Belsunce, working within the rehabilitation project run for the district, where one of the issues addressed was to question the urban and human transformations that this renovation provoked.
Take up once more the line of questioning an inscription rooted in three fields (artist, working on research with two sociologists, activist) enabling me to imagine a new organisation of my ‘preoccupations of space’ and new relationships with my various involvements. Act and propose forms anchored in my own experience, but which however would not serve an ideology – not even a counter ideology – work with human science researchers, yet not letting any of these forms become the illustration of a sociological issue. I participated and documented the inhabitants' fight against their planned eviction – a fine fight with a few victories: the inhabitants won the right to remain where they were, or to be rehoused or compensated. How can one bear witness to resistance ?
The Rue de la République, a central artery built in the 19th century «for commerce and humanity» [6], should both link the Vieux Port to the new port (built to absorb the increase in colonial commerce) and «clean up» the old districts. It had also been endowed with the mission to «draw back» the bourgeois into the centre of the town... as they had not established themselves there, causing the ruin of the investors of that era. Those who did come to live there were not welcome: dock workers, shopkeepers, lower middle class... very similar to those who keep it alive today. Its spectacular clearance through the district and its architectecture have been widely documented and praised, but the street will always bear the stigmate of its initial failure : «failure», «decline» or «curse» are the recurring representations in the accounts told of its history. Industrious and commercial, it will however fulfil the economic development objective assigned to it, but with unwanted/uninvited inhabitants. I have found few images of this street and its inhabitants in public archives – but undoubtedly they do exist. Their scarcity or this lack of indexing to make them to be accessible has often been explained to me thus: «Doubtlessly nobody wanted to document that which was initially a failure» at the Chamber of Commerce, or «There was nothing there to...» at the Amis du Vieux Marseille (Friends of Old Marseille). So I suggested setting up a documentary archive by collecting or recording the images and documents produced by the inhabitants since the beginning of the renovation. I also paid much attention to the other people's images and other images: of activists, movie makers or photographers, and supported their development where I could. Then I produced my own images, two series of photographs : the first, of the abandoned Haussmann' apartments, the second, of the housing being built on the perimeter destined for the middle and upper classes whose «return» is today – once again - desired.
Build up an archive of «documents of experience» [7], then distribute them and place them in the centre of debate : my photographs are shown in research seminars and published on the Centre-Ville Pour Tous's website as well as in art reviews [8], a contribution of all the images taken, of some films made of the road9 and other documents collected is under preparation at the Departmental Archives. There is a project for a book which will mainly contain the photographs and the words of all the participants of this story. I see this work as a small question about value – common value, the value of exchanging. As for the subject itself, I would without doubt have done nothing less than what the inhabitants themselves have done : move a private problem into the public domain, participate in its regeneration and in the debate, forecast the futures, build a picture. But more egotistically, is it better for me to not renounce Utopia, but to convert my anger into a game ?
1 -Lead within a research-action run by the sociologists Jean-Stéphane Borja and Véronique Manry, entitled « Urban renewal in Marseilles, popular centrality and citizens' participation». The research-actions were processes that combined thought and involvement from a researcher's position. Financed by the Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture/Ministère de l’Equipement and the PACA Regional Council. Report published on the CVPT site.
2 - CVPT is a non-profit-making association established in Marseilles in 2000, which defends the issue of a rehabilitation that respects the rights of the current inhabitants to live in the town.
www.centrevillepourtous.asso.fr
3 – Danielle Servant quoted in Libération, 30 September 2004.
4 – Quoted in the film by Thomas Donadieu, La Trace, 2005.
5- www.la-compagnie.org
6- Lettre de la Municipalité à l’Empereur, 10 September 1860. Jasmin C., Jasmin D., Marseille : la rue Impériale. Revue de l’Art, n° 106, 1994.
7- Communications, n°71, « Le parti pris du document (The view held by a document) » Paris, published by Seuil, September 2001 ; Communications, n°79, « Des faits et des gestes (Acts and gestures) (Le parti pris du document, 2) », Paris, published by Seuil, June 2006.
8- Urban Makers, Cities on the Edge. B_books, Berlin 2008. Editor : Emanuele Guidi.
9- Some of the films made since 2004 : J’y suis, j’y reste (I'm here, I'm staying)by Sygrind Palis ; La République by Denis Gheerbrant ; Divers gens (Various people)by Marc Ball ; Situation Joliette by Till Roeskens…
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