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 As Paris undergoes great change, a curator documents the difference with art. The Metropolis Observed November 2001
But during the next 15 years the city's 13th arrondissement will be the site of the greatest structural transformation to visit Paris since the days of Haussmann and Napoleon III. And in the Gallic tradition of public debate, an urban curator is creating a forum of architects, construction workers, artists, and residents to form the Centre d'Art en Mouvement, a series of revolving public installations designed to comment on urban change. Soon the 13th arrondissement will be unrecognizable to its former users. The industrial mills, which once ground flour for all of France, will house the new Université Paris VII. A factory will become Christian de Portzamparc's Ecole d'Architecture Valle de Seine. Next to the new Bibliothèque Nationale, the government is building two more libraries that will hold space for 4,000 readers. And at the project's center is a plan to renovate the Gare d'Austerlitz train station, sink one and a half miles of tracks below ground, and build a massive, office-lined Avenue de France on its top. "The scale is unprecedented for France," says Gilles-Antoine Langlois, an urbanist consultant to the Parisian government and the nascent center. In the midst of the rubble, the Centre d'Art en Mouvement won't emerge as a museum, exactly. Instead it will be a rotating series of installations and conferences throughout the city to provoke discussion about the process of urban change. "I want public art that is in dialogue with the old and new city, and the ways we use space," says curator Sigrid Pawelke. "Every day people sweep streets, or are shuttled in from the suburbs to work in enormous buildings. People are evicted. People are divided from one another. We want public art that startles us into seeing the forms that the city takes around us. This is not commemorating a place with a static monument: it is more like curating an urban disruption." In July Pawelke gathered architects, artists, city officials, residents, and construction workers to tour the quarter's construction sites and think about the forms artistic expression might take. As the interdisciplinary band peered into the 30-foot holes dug for the libraries and climbed the scaffoldings over the train tracks, construction worker Abdalghain Zebiri commented that acts of construction are often beautiful: Would it be possible to film parts of them to display in the nearby Parc Bercy? Paul Branca may do something like that. Amid billboards advertising the virtues of the new Paris, the painter proposes dressing in construction gear, punching a time card, and painting his own billboard image of the workers on-site, every weekday from nine to five. "I will put in overtime if necessary," he says. "But the piece will never be finished, per se. It will change as fast as my paintbrush can change it. It will be a labor whose final results can't be fully seen. And hopefully it will be in sight of the construction workers and the public view--and the two audiences will come together." Other artists have proposed projecting films from the scaffolding of the nearby Tour St. Jacques and building bubblelike tube tents to house refugees, foreign workers, and the homeless. One muralist wants to paint the sides of the garbage trucks that take debris away from the construction site to highlight their role as roaming collectors of waste and change. Baudelaire might approve, but will the city of Paris? Perhaps. "Public art takes time," says Pawelke, who worked at New York's P.S. 1 in the late 1990s. "At first the city doesn't see painted garbage trucks as a form of art. But we convince them." Although the center has preliminary plans to organize joint exhibitions with the Palais de Tokyo, Pawelke feels no rush to give the nomadic organization a permanent home. "Architecture is an object of desire and the stage across which we all pass," she says. "In another sense, the city is already both." |
