LeS VISITAÏRES DU FUTUR
project co-piloted with Alexia Antuofermo
“Ïels sont fraïes, ïels sont bellums les nouvaïles del futur.”
-Les Visitaïres du futur [~3020]
Storymapping The Visitaïres - here - (in French)
“Ïels sont fraïes, ïels sont bellums les nouvaïles del futur.”
-Les Visitaïres du futur [~3020]
Storymapping The Visitaïres - here - (in French)
photo: Chloé Devis
By taking on the role of two ambassadors from the year 3020, The Visitaïres from the Future, we questioned the place of concrete utopias -entopias- in the transformations currently underway in architecture and urbanism in North-East Paris. To this effect, we anchored our investigation on emergent practices that bring forth other forms of community and solidarity with the La Chapelle neighborhood. The documentary investigation and testimonies grounded our reflections on the future already present -both close at hand and far away. This field work and the actions undertaken with neighborhood residents around their visions of the future opened up space for these alternative trajectories to gather force and become possible.
This invitation to time travel offered residents the possibility to conceive of the different urban futures for their neighborhood. Through a collective documentary fiction, we wove a fiction that took on various forms: model cities, a zine, performances, and a guided itinerary. The material manifestation of these different visions in the artistic work resonated with the documentary investigation underway on entopic possibilities in the neighborhood, planned urban works, and real estate speculation. The goal was to create a favorable climate for a critique of our society’s possible futures. During the various in situ performances and artistic interventions, residents were invited to exchange their desires and fears for the future and to reimagine the urban transformations currently underway. These micro-events-actions - micro-torques in consciousness collective and individual - invited us to become aware of the future already inscribed in the present. Through these divergent trajectories, lifelines were written, crossed, and intertwined in a cycle of workshops around architecture and life in the future. Finally, we deployed a constellation on invisible cities -now material manifest- that emerged from our play in the workshops at the end of this investigation.
By taking on the role of two ambassadors from the year 3020, The Visitaïres from the Future, we questioned the place of concrete utopias -entopias- in the transformations currently underway in architecture and urbanism in North-East Paris. To this effect, we anchored our investigation on emergent practices that bring forth other forms of community and solidarity with the La Chapelle neighborhood. The documentary investigation and testimonies grounded our reflections on the future already present -both close at hand and far away. This field work and the actions undertaken with neighborhood residents around their visions of the future opened up space for these alternative trajectories to gather force and become possible.
This invitation to time travel offered residents the possibility to conceive of the different urban futures for their neighborhood. Through a collective documentary fiction, we wove a fiction that took on various forms: model cities, a zine, performances, and a guided itinerary. The material manifestation of these different visions in the artistic work resonated with the documentary investigation underway on entopic possibilities in the neighborhood, planned urban works, and real estate speculation. The goal was to create a favorable climate for a critique of our society’s possible futures. During the various in situ performances and artistic interventions, residents were invited to exchange their desires and fears for the future and to reimagine the urban transformations currently underway. These micro-events-actions - micro-torques in consciousness collective and individual - invited us to become aware of the future already inscribed in the present. Through these divergent trajectories, lifelines were written, crossed, and intertwined in a cycle of workshops around architecture and life in the future. Finally, we deployed a constellation on invisible cities -now material manifest- that emerged from our play in the workshops at the end of this investigation.
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Initial costume sketches by the designer Emeline Antuofermo
breathing apparatuses to protect against resident pollution and ambient viruses (above left) and facial recognition camouflage (above right and bottom left)
breathing apparatuses to protect against resident pollution and ambient viruses (above left) and facial recognition camouflage (above right and bottom left)
Constellation of Invisible Cities
Installation at the Social & Cultural Center Rosa Parks, Paris 18e
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Installation at the Cultural Center Paris Anim René Binet, 18e
WORKSHOPS
(selection from the investigation)
At the heart of this investigation, the workshops brought together artists and researchers from various disciplines (photography, architecture/urbanism, literature, literature, contemporary art...) to work with residents to imagine different possible narrative futures for the neighborhood.
LET THE FUTURE RESONATE
Workshop organized as part of the conference “inscriptions in relations”, organized by Civic city at the Palais de la Porte Dorée February 15th, 2020
Enter free
You, inhabitants of the Earth, residents of the present, silver-tongued ones – ready your plumes. The Visitaïres from the future invite you to exchange tongues, link fingers, and let the ink spill! Together we will creolize our languages and our characters in order to create a multiverse of idioms.
How do you conjugate the past and the future? How will we distinguish between people, genders, and species? Who will speak in our name? Will our memories crystallize in the cloud or be engraved upon cenotaphs? How will our bodies render our gestures material? How will our signs and ourselves be drawn into and onto the world?
We come together, pull apart – get close – and speak.
You, inhabitants of the Earth, residents of the present, silver-tongued ones – ready your plumes. The Visitaïres from the future invite you to exchange tongues, link fingers, and let the ink spill! Together we will creolize our languages and our characters in order to create a multiverse of idioms.
How do you conjugate the past and the future? How will we distinguish between people, genders, and species? Who will speak in our name? Will our memories crystallize in the cloud or be engraved upon cenotaphs? How will our bodies render our gestures material? How will our signs and ourselves be drawn into and onto the world?
We come together, pull apart – get close – and speak.
MY LIBRARY FROM THE FUTURE
Workshops organized at la Bibliothèque Václav Havel January 31st and February 6th & 27th 2020
And when we walk into a library in the future, will there still be books, or humans? What role will it play in neighborhood life? Will it welcome refugees and offer language class -as it does now? And will the librarians still offer advice on good reads, great albums, and where to get medical help and find a place to sleep out of the cold? Will there be a seed library – and maybe the readers will have lunch with their newly borrowed books and tunes in a neighborhood canteen with fruits and vegetables harvested from just outside the door? Maybe it will be a kind of social and cultural center where you can make an appointment with a doctor at the same time you browse the newest comics? But as you may have already noticed, this future, is already very present.
Throughout the workshops, we imagined the evolving role of the library throughout time. At the end of this cycle of workshops, the library took on form based on library patrons and librarians’ visions of their Library from the Future.
Throughout the workshops, we imagined the evolving role of the library throughout time. At the end of this cycle of workshops, the library took on form based on library patrons and librarians’ visions of their Library from the Future.
MY NEIGHBOR FROM THE FUTURE
Workshop organized at Le Centre Rosa Parks March 20th, 2020
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Who will be my neighbor from the future? How will they dress and speak – and live? In this workshop, we will imagine with residents present their future neighbors in order to anticipate coming changes – and to welcome our future-distant neighbors. Each participant will write and draw the portrait of their Neighbor from the Future. These portraits will weave together, taking on the form of a cartographic fresco, presenting our descendants and their ways of life.
IF YOU WERE A SHAMAN, WHAT SHAMAN WOULD YOU BE?
Workshops organized December 8th, 2020 & January 8th, 2021 at Le Centre Rosa Parks
We invited participants in this photo workshop to live and reinterpret visually a shamanistic experience – between past and future, visible and invisible, reality and fiction. Through various forms present throughout the world since the dawn of time, shamans have through rituals and rites healed members of their communities, exorcised plagues, and predicted the future. They played an essential role in troubled times, mediating and bargaining between gods and demons on behalf of their flocks. We could use some powerful shamans at the moment!
Each participant was invited to step into the skin of shaman, inspired by their own experience, in order to invoke a possible community to come, and reflect on what knowledge they would like they to pass onto future generations. Each person invented their own costume and rituals, write their own portents, create their totems and spells… and present them for the camera – as the shutter clicks, anything can happen!
Each participant was invited to step into the skin of shaman, inspired by their own experience, in order to invoke a possible community to come, and reflect on what knowledge they would like they to pass onto future generations. Each person invented their own costume and rituals, write their own portents, create their totems and spells… and present them for the camera – as the shutter clicks, anything can happen!
Over the course of an evening, we consulted the oracles, wrote, recounted, and sung the future already present in each one of us. The participants were invited on a voyage in language and writing to pass through time, linking past, present, and future.
