Encounters Beyond the Gallery by Dohmn Renate;

Author:Dohmn, Renate;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4760959
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2016-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

Faction 3

Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere

(Rikki T is travelling from London to Paris by Eurostar)

London St Pancras International, Eurostar terminal. I have just clambered onto the train and found my seat. I am beginning to relax, waiting for the train to pull out of the station. Paris is beckoning and a much anticipated break. I will be visiting a friend and seeing Valéry Grancher’s exhibition The Shiwiars Project at the Palais de Tokyo. Grancher’s visit to the Amazon jungle is the subject of his exhibition. A project too close to mine to be missed, and a perfect excuse for a trip to Paris.

The train is pulling out of the station; we are on the move. I enjoy this space of limbo, of in-betweenness. Being in transit, between one place and another, leaving one world behind and not yet immersed in another. It is always a good time to think. The suspense between places frees up the mind. While I am hurtling through space, my mind is free to roam, think, daydream or just switch off, sink into travel drowsiness. I lean back, begin to unwind, sip my cappuccino. The coffee is good. The train is gliding through the outskirts of London. I wonder what my friend’s place is going to be like. She has just moved from London to Paris and has been given student housing. She had been concerned about where she would end up, and mentioned that the refurbishment of some of the units was long overdue.

My mind wanders. I find myself thinking about Renée Green’s auto-ethnographic account of the Unité Project. 1 Has the thought of staying in a crumbling student accommodation triggered the connection? I imagine Renée Green’s incongruous appearance amongst the remaining inhabitants of the mostly derelict housing estate. I can well picture the awkwardness of the final party she describes in her field journal: residents solidly clinging to one another, just like the artists who have descended on the building for the duration of the project. I ask myself what kind of ethnography this constitutes. Or, is this not an ethnographic project at all? Renée Green certainly talks about her part of the project as fieldwork.2 Curator Yves Aupetitallot is ambitious in his aims. He wants social-political transformation and deliberately shuns art institutions, situating the project in Corbusier’s social architecture, or what is left of it, instead.3 But as has been pointed out, the failure of Corbusier’s utopianism of social living is mirrored in the notable divide and sense of alienation between the artists and the inhabitants.

Escaping the clutches of the art world proves a difficult affair, even if spatially removed from the spaces of art. This project does not appear to make sense to the local inhabitants, yet it figures in the art world. I wonder what the local residents would have made of Green’s choice collection of books on the improvised bookshelf in her Unité apartment. She has photographed the bookshelf for the auto-ethnographic account of her residence at Unité.

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