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The project

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CU (Campement Urbain) is a collective creating artistic devices in order to experience new fictions in urban space. For the 30th anniversary of the Georges-Pompidou-Centre, CU encourages you to contribute your ideas and convictions to set up the programme of what will be the very first global town council . A project fostering a new approach of one’s open-mindedness towards the world, of the conditions of citizenship as well as the pleasure of diversity by creating a contradictory expression : a town council - normally limited to the local level – but which is here extended to a global dimension. CU uses artistic devices where normally things are cautiously kept silent

How to participate ? You can participate in the Global town-council – project until August 15th 2007 either by visiting www.mariemonde.org on the internet or during your visit at the Air de Paris –exhibition on the 6 th floor of the Georges Pompidou-Center : share your ideas and contribute texts or drawings, send your photographs or create an architectural model. Write a short story or any other piece of fiction, invent new concepts of space. You can also think of new professions, modify or invent laws, design virtual spaces using sound, a ready-to-use kit for encounters or words one would use. You can invent new customs, processes for the passing-on of memories, or think of means to invade rigidity with playfulness and to introduce uncertainty into certainty, creativity into standardised environments. Invent new data-transfer and fresh resources…etc.

Another way to participate in the Global town-council is to make a donation thus allowing CU to print the programme of the GTC, based on your suggestions and contributions.

If the amount of money collected is more than is needed for the publication, CU will then set up the first version of a virtual network of Global Town councils which could subsequently be adapted to different social, political, artistic local contexts on the basis of the Global town council’s original programme.

If the amount of money collected was even more important than what is needed to create a network of Global town-councils, CU would then elaborate a prototype of a Global Town-council in a city whose inhabitants are open-minded towards the world’s diversity.

WHY such a project ? 30 years ago, at the very moment when the Georges-Pompidou-Center was created as an experimental, open-minded cultural platform, the city of Sevran, one of several global towns in the suburbs of Paris, chose to build a town hall made from prefabricated materials.

Today, the permanency of this sheer coincidence points out the fact that a great number of cities across this country and around the world are presently facing the same complex social reality, i. e multicultural populations affected by poverty and relegation.

Confronted with this situation, the state-nations seem rather unable to provide their populations with a sufficient framework capable of coping with their economic and symbolic needs; city-governments are left alone in their daily struggle with these questions. It is true that most countries’ politics oscillate between either an indifferent attitude or repression and regression.

This situation that evolves alongside with the development of an ideology of generalised rivalry, the everyone’s-on –his- own –and- for- himself-principle undermines our collective capacity to adapt to the world’s changing, in terms of mobility and migration of populations, so that, as a result, we find ourselves in the role of a old fashioned spectator.

One of the major artistic challenges of this project we propose you to engage in, is to conceive possible modes of gaining access to citizenship by creating a communal (public) organism capable of organising, experimenting and developing another way of building citizenship. In other words, even if not everyone can vote, for they are not considered as fully vested citizens in a given country, does this mean they automatically have to abandon - on a strictly local basis – the idea of a welcoming place, a place where they could obtain recognition and thus self-esteem, not only on a private, but also on a political basis, a democratic place built upon associations, but visible also on an institutional level?

Today, in France, mayors -who are supposed to be the foremost institutions representing the people and the Republic – struggle to succeed in linking the local and the national level. Thus, town councils tend to remain French-dominated areas focussing on administrative procedures from which every other language is excluded. Political functions, often limited to the expression of electoral results, don’t create or help to develop a context in which the very basis of democracy could be renewed by raising basic questions about citizenship in order to organise a genuine democratic participatory process.

Frequently, town councils find themselves in contradictory positions right from the beginning: on the one hand they are obliged to perform executive procedures, on the other they must set up autonomously specific local proceedings. The outcome is most of the time a certain “vagueness” in administrative procedures combined with the widely acknowledged inflexibility. Yet, a town council in its institutional sense (and history has proved this to be true) could have been a place where the state’s principles of homogeneity and rigidity allow room for discussion.

The aim of the GTC could or should it reside in its capacity of letting some “play” / looseness appear in administrative procedures by introducing “zones of/ for uncertainty”?

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It is the town councils who help to instigate a legal status by officially recognising one’s identity, the registering of newborn babies, weddings and so on. It is the town hall that propagates the founding principles of the Republic, which are engraved in its stones (pediment). It is them, too, who marginalise those incapable of adapting themselves to the set of established values, never considering any fluctuation, trajectories and movements being made at the very time of speaking.

How to integrate alternative forms of identity, those which are in the state –of- becoming and to develop an approach whose very essence would be diversity?
How to conceive an institutional space capable of not only accepting and fostering other languages and cultures, but of making these “contributions” a common basis in order to stop unjust and unequal treatments that scorn all republican principles?
The worst form of racism, is it not that which refuses to admit difference rather than that which refuses all that is different? I picture myself in the other and what I see has to be myself? Is there a way out of condescendence, that would make us consider differences as dynamic assets, a collective good that strengthens our social and societal project?

This is why the global town council must (or should) define alternative practices in order to function as a place where the necessary updating of universal rights can take place. A space of multiple languages, a place where one can experience other cultures, an Agora of translation, open discussion (and not only these that are instigated by officials and serve precise aims defined by the administration), a space in favour of associations, a public space where the idea of belonging and being able to construct citizenship can still rally and transcend differences?

The construction of the town hall of Sevran, made from prefabricated materials is parallel to the construction of the Georges-Pompidou-Center whose spatial concept aims at both modularity and flexibility, serving a democratic and constantly revised distribution of cultural practices, introduced as fundamentally emancipatory/ and liberating.

As for the townhall, its prefabrication results from its precarious situation and the absence of the Republic’s solidarity for a too-fast-growing city : a paradoxical situation of two places that are geographically close, but yet completely dissociated (in spite of the RER –B-inter-city or intra-city train line)

The majority of people living in Sevran (for example) are likely to spend their entire life in this place without ever getting to know the areas “in their own surroundings” (The Beaubourg Art Center for instance, situated at the final stop of the Regional train line RER B and more frequently the other way round). One is living in a “small-town-ambiance” at the core of which is “the highstreet”, reserved to a restrained group of people whose privacy does not allow or desire any encounter with the “Other”. Everybody who is different, not similar is seen as a disturbing element and is deprived of the community.

The exiguity of the prefabricated elements within the town hall of Sevran and also the major’s office, the resulting physical closeness and radical proximity that determines the type of relation within the building reflects what happens in the community itself. (Over) Crowding is one of the distinctive features of social life in Sevran’s public spaces. This results in an auto-protective behaviour in people’s relation to the other. In addition, the precarious state of the building stands for a precarious institution and this results in a precarious idea of citizenship in itself. Crowdedness and precarious citizenship refer not only to economic fragility, but also to a fragilised idea of the self, including a constant risk of being de-placed.
Should the GTC welcome/ foster the procedures of constituting new identities and transforming collective identities ? Should (or must) the GTC invent strategies of taking root? – Rituals of welcoming, recognising and belonging to a community? Should (or can) the Global town council consist of a building? Or rather fictional space that can be modified depending on the tales from (all over) the world?

The prefabricated building that hosts Sevran’s town hall is the result of the attempt to displace a model, a local version of a device which was conceived and produced elsewhere, chosen from a range of products in a catalogue, a module that can be multiplied if needed.
In places which are open to the world’s changing situation, the appearance of new populations does not happen spontaneously. Having undergone a long procedure of displacement, they are above all displaced people coming from elsewhere, people whose citizenship is not always known, sometimes ignored, marginalised, and denied. As a consequence, Sevran local population’s citizenship is also in itself gradual, prefabricated, made up from multiple elements taken from different cultures, from history and geography, memories of one’s origins, from diverse political backgrounds, and meant to adapt to their new home’s national features;
These concepts are interacting, confronting each other, being compared and reassembled. Within the Republic’s framework of universal ideals every community has to deal with diverse situations, the multiplicity of people’s origins, with their cultures and ways-of-being, with rupture. A non-meditated confrontation, often a forced one, constrained, renounced, a local version on the level of a generation, without sharing, lacking a more global vision, disoriented and without any major political project. The brutality of citizenship based on assimilation and abnegation that sometimes requires to desert one’s origins.

Should (or must) the GTC be part of a network of all Global Town Councils, the citizens of which would be both examples and ambassadors of the new concept of citizenship, a place of experimentation for reversed anthropological practices, in a place where exclusion is replaced by integration? Is the GTC supposed to be a network of shared experience the results of which would be spread, discussed, exchanged? An open network of a diffused movement that questions and crystallises hopes for emancipation from different angles of the world? Is the GTC supposed to be a network based on complicity, sharing and the passing of memory, where the denial, refusal and disrespect of a citizen’s rights and equality could be recorded, shared, broadcast and fought against? A network based on horizontal civil authorities that, in a transversal manner, would act in favour of the idea of a conurban intra-urban worldwide agglomeration of a city-refuge.

© Campement Urbain
(S.Blocher / J.Faidit / F.Daune / J-S.Kin / F.Jupin)
Avril 2007