Paris/Berlin/Montréal...

at the
MIVAEM - INVISIBLE CITY
Montréal, 20 September to 1st October, 2006

The Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin are invited to the 7th MIVAEM biennal, organized by Champ Libre, with the support of the French Consulat in Montréal. www.champlibre.com

Programs curated by Nathalie Hénon and Jean-François Rettig.
For detailled programs, please click below.

PROGRAM 1 - HABITATS

PROGRAM 2 - URBAN VISIONS

PROGRAM 3 - WHEN CITY SLEEPS

PROGRAM 4 - SIGNES, INDICES, TRACES

Introduction text:

INVISIBLE CITY?

The city has never so present and nevertheless the ignorance we have of it incessantly grows. Contemporary form of social links, cities alone account for more than half of the world’s population, and nevertheless, at the same time, we scarcely surpass the sedentary instinct of our ancestors’ rural societies. What do we know of our cities? If they constitute and determine henceforth the dominant life model, it is necessary to recognize that we know nothing or so little about our own manner to living, for of our cities, we are ignorant of everything. Its history, its communities, the collective or individual lives which constitute it… First of all, the interweaving of communication and circulation networks, this city is a reflection of us: unconscious, invisible to itself, in a constant effort to take hold of and to reinvent itself, between the deaf imperative of the rationalisation of exchanges and the aspiration to a new form of living together.

Habitats
If one considers what are actually cities throughout the world, and what is absent from the images and common representations of "the city", the "invisible city" is not the one of an "imaginary of the city" that the artist would only have to capture with his butterfly net at the moment of an inspired daydream. Today, the invisible city is above all one of poverty and semi-poverty, that of misery and half misery, one of alienation at the cost of life and the price of housing. Our modern habitat.

Urban visions
With this necessary report, a representation of the city may also provoke reflection of other states. The city as object of meditation and contemplation, a mirror held out toourselves in which we see the possibility of an appeasement or a renewal. Facing the urban landscape, it is the feeling of belonging and reconciliation which attains us. In a mirror, our environment discovers its abundance and diversity. Through our gaze it is a city until then invisible which emerges. Utopian and already real, because modifying our gaze on the world transforms the world.

When city sleeps
But this reflection possesses in itself its reverse side, similar to the succession of day and night. Human activity and our thoughts attain another state when the world’s noisy bustling activity ebbs, when the race of exchanges calms itself for a time. The nocturnal city is favourable to a unique reflection on the individual. Alone and nevertheless in the public sphere. Wandering then truly becomes the expression of movement of nightly thoughts, at random, our walk not only discovers the urban space as we have never seen it, our gaze discovers the possibility of joining the individual and the collective, the imagination of eventualities and the appearance of subjective impressions in public space.

Signes, indices, traces
Nevertheless, the city remains above all, the stratified place of our collective memory and history. If we want to apeak about the invisible city, we have first to question this memory of which we are constituted and of which we forget the traces. These cities, which determine as much our way of life, receptacles of passed events, of conflicts and of ideals much more powerful than we can suppose them. Walls are erected, buildings are opened up, and cities are torn down or rebuilt for the benefits of an archaic urban planning or of a "superior" ideal. The comprehension of our contemporary culture goes through there. And a documentary gait on the signs, the clues and the traces in urban space appears as the other true face of the nocturnal city and of wandering. For in this gait also join the individual and the collective. In the urban grid, our look discovers a place or a present or passed non-place, a part of history. The city as collective construction of memory, historic and cultural production place. The invisible city is maybe there. And the issue is enormous: to rediscover our history and re-appropriate what constitutes a part of our contemporary culture.

Jean-François Rettig, Nathalie Hénon