There's a lot of controversies about him and his work, but is it he who summons them? Pivotal questions just often turn out to be problematic. Also that he doesn't like to secern between architecture, text and art––significant for all is thinking, existential not functional …––So what's like to be ( in ) an «existential space», a space who is challenging, who fuels a certain confrontation and concentration? There seems to be apt only the space of exclusion tempted by negative definitions: not privatised, not commercial, not engrossed, not controlled…
This conversation tries to approach some questions again––re-questioning and answering can be so illuminating––centered around Le Montavoix––the mountain with the voice(s) which is a refuge de passage gardé, a shelter for people on foot, recently changed by him to Le Montavoies ( the mountain with the paths ), to denote the entire land up there, the wholly «non-project»––or, as congenial Amin Maalouf in Le Rocher de Tanios said:
Ma Montagne est ainsi. Attachement au sol et aspiration au départ. Lieu de refuge, lieu de passage.
Terre du lait et du miel et du sang. Ni paradis ni enfer. Purgatoire.
«The proletariat created by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this free and rightless* [vogelfrei] proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their accustomed mode of life, could not immediately adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned in massive quantities into beggars, robbers and vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases under the force of circumstances. Hence at the end of the fifteenth and during the whole of the sixteenth centuries, a bloody legislation against vagabondage was enforced throughout Western Europe. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as «voluntary» criminals, and assumed that it was entirely within their powers to go on working under the old conditions which in fact no longer existed.».
––Marx calls there the group of wage labourers free or «bird-free» (vogelfrei), meaning at one and the same time that while the proletariat are not property anymore ( like slaves or serfs ), they are nonetheless themselves without property and cast out of the community of property owners.
––However, the problem with Agamben's word «forestieri» is that in translations it becomes «refugee’, «refugié», «stranger», «étranger» and the connotation of forest gets lost. It seems that currently again «strangers» end up in the woods, and that the woods–in whatever way they may be–become more and more the real public—the real common space…Yi-Fu Tuan says in his text «Strangers and Strangeness»:
«The words 'forest' and 'foreigne' have the same root and the basic idea is derived from the Latin 'foranus', which means 'situated on the outside'. Forests and foreigners lie outside the known world of kinsfolk and cleared forests. They are strange, vaguely threatening…»––Somehow I’m also a stranger––I am still having the Belgian nationality–– and a «neighbour» walking by said once to me: «You have to be a stranger to be able to do what you’re doing.»––Anyway once I read of someone who was talking with «strangers» in the woods: people wanting to leave their country or people that just arrived in countries that did not accept them, and there is also this verbal connection between people who are refugees and are living /hiding in the forest ...
––Just remember «Voices from the 'Jungle': Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp», but there's the jungle more a metaphore…
––Yes, it's «Le peuple des clandestins», Calmann-Lévy, 2007 by Smaïn Laacher a french sociologist and judge.
––Well, let's go back to the refuge of LeM. where you are not just playing ironically with words and meanings of legal texts and terms and ostensibly 'purposeless' practicing, but where you are apparently showing a great sensitivity towards ongoing issues…
––Nonetheless all of this––what was said before about the «refuge» in particular––is connected to that one building, the so-called LeM., the highest building on that plot of land, because the land is much bigger and I started to use «Le Montavoies»: the mountain with the paths, for the whole ensemble of the land and its different structures, though only «Le Montavoix» is the refuge de passage gardé by final approvement from the administration of Saint Claude, who classified the place «refuge» according to its fulfilment of these legal articles––so, and that means people have the right to stay…
––Whenever someone is coming up to LeM. one will normally find somebody there––or can it happen that nobody is there, that the refuge is unattended?
––LeM. is classified as «refuge gardé» and that means there has to be a guard––otherwise it's closed––, there is very bad experiences with «refuges non gardés» because many of them are destroyed by fire… anyway I choose because I had the idea to work with young...––I call them «criminals»…
––You mean the ‘guardians’ of the refuge are young «criminals»?
––Yes, since I have these dual responsibility––to keep the refuge guarded and also the responsibility of being the «guard» of these youngsters to whom the society has said that they have a problem––, I share these responsibilities by giving them one part, so they become guard of the refuge…––so what I do is that I receive one of these young guys that cannot attune their being to the society: who collide somehow with the society or vice versa––one each––one at a time is working with me for a period of three months up there in LeM., and although our rhythm is quite different, we share a common ground in space, in taking same pathways through the forest…
––You're there together three months sharing almost all the moments and spaces…
––And what happens is that it turns the logic of this guy who was before in a secured unit, and lets call it what it is: a borstal, a guarded lock-up––and who's now becoming a guard himself by taking care of everything, telling the people who're coming all their doings––so after a period of time they become very concerned and very responsible, there is no dilly-dallying anymore and they take everything very serious.
––That's the effect of the «Waldschule»––isn't it ?––But how it came that you decided to be with juvenile delinquents?
––I really like to work with guys from different generations––it has always been like this––, I like this impossible search for contact between generations: the old teacher and the young students. I was teaching a lot, and I like to do that, but I had the feeling that students, by the educational system by the Bologna Process, the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) or whatever––that they become like book keepers, they have to manage credits and points and all is governed like in economics, and what happens is that there is these game-playing with professors to get what they are supposed to get, i.e. to get as fast and easiest as possible these grades by trying to avoid any difficult courses, trying to go there where it seems to be lightest––so I had the idea that these guys who had a kind of a criminal behaviour, that they are much more honest actually…
––Because they are not that cunning, they are not that tricking, they just bluntly took something but aren't calculating?
––About that…I also like the way they talk about themselves, in the evening when it comes out, it's really interesting, and I really like this and we are laughing also often a lot …I admire the way these youngsters appear unable to learn, impossible to integrate in certain systems…
––And how about any tensions?
––Yes, of course there is also sometimes a lot of tension, I have never been together so long lasting with anybody, not even with my children, so close together, because I stay with them all the time, and we share almost everything…–– And yes, I tell these youngsters that the forest is a school, but a school where there is nothing to learn, a school for those who do not learn…and indeed there's nothing to gain from each other––as in «school»: no diploma, no wages…––So I started to work with the ones who are not adult, who are not eighteen, where the responsibility stays with parents or a judge, who then delegate this responsibility to an institution, and, as many know, these institutions are often more problem than a solution …one exception seemed to me Oikoten, a Belgian organisation who started to organise walks to Santiago de Compostela etc. …we got in contact; they took over the responsibility for the youngsters from the youth judge and transferred it to me for a period of three months. But then the belgian government is cutting down the money for Oikoten, and changing their «task»––Governmental officials didn’t––and often still don't think that this wary relation is a good idea to work with difficult youngsters: they want fast results…So I’m still working with Oikoten, but I’m also getting in touch with other organisations and institutes, for ex. the French Protection Judiciaire de Jeunesse…
––All this seems quite reminiscent of progressive education like Henri Paul Hyacinthe Wallon, Célestin Freinet and following Fernand Deligny.
––Yes, I’m very interested in the work of Deligny!––Deligny contemplated and studied the movements of the autistic children or the children with behavioural problems he lived with in the hills of the Cevennes or the Vercors, not for educational or other purposes but out of respect for a world which he did not want to dominate but to partake in…
––How are your personal relations with Deligny?
––My interest in Deligny goes back to a time shortly before I started with LeM., when I was doing research in cities, my architectural practice was towards getting more and more research in cities where I worked with students or ex-students to make investigations, to look-out for «public space», that is to say, spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment, i.e. the non-private space, or non-privately owned space, in other words, space which is economically uninteresting and which can be seen as a confrontation with insecurity, as exposure, as vulnerability, and which ultimately rejects the use of the term «public» for spaces that are actually more and more privatized and protected. Such looking and attempts of «reading» / understanding of public space does not arise from theoretical or historical knowledge but from a position where one undergoes one's own research by just being in public space, by personal engagement and exhaustion––like a stray dog in the city one can find those spaces…––but then at a certain moment, when I was preparing a project, a large project of wander research into public space by taking long, non-touristic, non-comfortable walks and bicycle rides, to make an inventory of public space which should result in maps, photographs, texts and videos, I was thinking, if, what I am doing here, has not already been done by the Situationists––and then I was looking through it, and I found it quite different, since they were talking about errancies, walking around purposeless in the city, whereas I tried to convince students to really make protocol walks, very long defined walks, looking only for five parameters…––but from there, when I was looking at Guy Debord et al., I saw the name Deligny and saw a few quotes by him, and at that moment and for that project what we were planning I proposed to take Deligny as our guide––I trusted very much these few lines which I had found…it was very difficult in that time to find any book by him, but two three months later came out this incredible book on and by Fernand Deligny edited by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo...So I worked quite long and deep with the work of Deligny, notably I organised an exhibition and also a colloquium, which was called «Forestieri» congrously, and where I showed the maps that Deligny and his collaborators made and which Sandra Alvarez de Toledo had borrowed very kindly to me––and while all this was going I had found this piece of land––, thus from the very beginning Deligny was like a friend, although I never met, it was too late…
––Would you like to say something on how it then came that you changed the cities, the public space for the forest?
––In 1998 I bought first a little house in the French Jura, I know the Jura for a very long time, because of the caves––the Jura with its large karst limestone caves, which I like a lot, it feels to me that's the place where I belong, it keeps me awake, and from the moment that I arrived, the very first day I was very convinced that it was a very good step, that I had to move from Belgium to France, to the Jura, but I was not convinced about the house, and I started to think, maybe you should do more, and from that moment on I had been looking, and that lasted until 2006 when I found LeM. in the High Jura, although it was then unimaginable that it would become possible…
––Elective affinities are that strong, and they create more––apparently you were never alone up there in the mountain forest, thus LeM. is not a place for a hermit.
––No. And in any case there is civilisation everywhere: A plane drones past high overhead, undoubtedly on its way to the city, communication and orientation satellites blink even higher up, if you don’t look carefully you might think they are stars. An animal passes by, panting. The high-voltage cable crackles in the damp night air, a tick crawls up to his groin. The forest is endless but the city is close by, the world is close by…––Anyway it's very important to understand that LeM. is really very close to the city – the city of Saint Claude, which is, although small, a real city, with a long history of migration (portugueses, russians, people form north of africa etc.), with a lot of worker collectives, unions, and which is now called by investors, developers and politicians: Plastipolis or La Plastics Vallée, where in between the CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator in Geneva , on the one side and on the other extremity the ITER, the experimental fusion power reactor, in Cadarache a very large stretched out contemporary city is developing as an endless long ribbon city in the valleys from Geneva, over Saint-Claude, Oyonnax, Lyon, Grenoble to Valence, where young active researchers are working in new technologies, and are living in individual houses and spend their spare time on leisure activities in the surrounding mountains...
––Thus what looks like an abandoned natural environment is rather an urban region…
––Just by knowing the pathway, little bypasses etc. in 25 min I can be in the city center, but you don't see the city at all because there is one mountain in between, so people are saying that's quite in nature where you are doing all this and I keep saying no, it's urban, it's very connected to the city…
––Nonetheless and although it's an urban fringe, it's particularly an «anthropological place» as Marc Augé called sites which offer people a space that empowers their identity, where they can meet other people with whom they share social references, and thereby opposed to non-sites or -places, which are not meeting spaces and do not build common references to any group, where we do not live in, and where the individual remains anonymous and lonely; one also thinks of Michel Certeau's L'Invention du quotidien––or, afore, Michel Foucault's similar concept of heterotopies:
«In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.»
–– I’m not so much a fan of Augé, especially not of the term «non-places». The places that I was looking for are really «spaces»: i.e. not non-places; surely they are «anthropological places», but what does that say?––And regarding this text by Foucault––and although it is very often quoted in architecture––I think it's far from his best texts––truthfully the text is not clear to me…––and so its apparent relation to LeM.––even though certain gestures have to be made there, like «One will have to walk from and to the refuge.»/ «The refuge is not a leisure place.»/and: «In the refuge one will ‘talk’ by means of space»…
––Thus and anyhow you're again in a public space…
––I consider the wood, which is next to the city as a contemporary, actual public space.
––After your criterias for being a public space?
––Yes, and most notably where at the start of the wood, where the wood and the city touch, heaps of rubbish: building rubble, work clothes, old drums, empty paint tins… Two cars parked there side by side… Or two people sitting together in one car. Youths and adults are coming here, before going to work, to school, home, before they have to go home… All these rituals, these clues of their desires, these furtively looking, whenever one sees the turning off the road, whenever one sees the path petering out at the tree trunks, whenever one sees the small garbage site beneath the trees…
––Why you consider 'space' a preferable way of communication? What means an encounter that takes place soundlessly, through space?
––We always use words, languages to communicate; we know how difficult it is to understand each other when we’re talking different languages; but even when we speak the same language we don’t understand each other, we don’t communicate. When I say blue I mean something very different from what you understand as being blue. But when we’re looking at space, when we are in spaces, when we think of spaces, we see them very very similar, even people from very different background, culture or age. When we recognise the fact that somebody is using or has used the space in an amazingly similar way as you did or used to do, there’s some kind of communication, you can communicate with that person, you understood the space in the same way as he or she did.
––Appears quite wayward…Could you explain that a shade more?
––The Book without a title that I made with Marc De Blieck was about some infrastructure along the Belgian highways (parking-lots, restaurants, shops and gas-stations) which are systematically and intensely used for informal, social, and more specifically sexual, mostly non-commercial contacts between bisexual or covert homosexual men. I had been working on these places with students before, and also often alone, also in many cities, making inventories, hanging out on these places for a long time, it probably goes back to the time when I was living in Manhattan, just after finishing school: over there I was a lot on the piers, abandoned, and at the same time, they «served» to a lot of «wild» people.
While being at these informal sex meeting places, I had a very vague feeling of recognizing these spaces, as if I had been there before, as if I knew them from very long time ago, it was a very vague, but good feeling, that went together with the unease, the feeling of danger. Later in 2005 or 2006 when I had been looking in București for ten days without finding any of these kind of places, I started thinking that I had lost the feeling, the capacity to find these kind of spaces, and then at the very last day of my stay, I found an enormous, very dense space, while I was walking there, there was a strange way of «communication» between the people that had made these spaces (without evening knowing that they were making space: they were making it just by going there, by coming back there again and again, tracing tracks like that, tracing by leaving their traces) and the people that 'made' this space in București and even myself: nobody was asking anything, there were no answers: we were just looking for the same space: we found the same space, for a similar need. That feeling, the certainty that we had found these spaces for our needs, made me deeply happy…––I’m sorry, it must sound pathetic to you… I guess I can’t formulate it much better than that.––
But another thing: whilst working in the building LeM., I’m measuring to put new plinths on the wall, my folding meter stick is 2 meter long, I start measuring from the angle of the space, keep my finger on the 2 meter point, want to put the meter stick again in position, to be able to get to the total length of the room (more than 6 meter), and exactly at the place where I’m holding my finger on the wall I see a small vertical pencil line, it must have been put there by the one who installed the previous plinths there more than two hundred years ago, I’m doing exactly the same thing, in the same way as the person that did it long before I was living: it is as if that person taps on my shoulder, that we say «hi mate», through time, in space. I have the same feeling when I see old marks, left by wood cutters, a hundred years ago, the marks grew up 5 meter higher, but I recognize the signs, it’s the same ones that I’m putting on threes now, to indicate that I should not cut them. Maybe a hundred years later somebody might see one of these signs, and if so we’ll tap on each other’s shoulder for a second…
––Are these kind of thoughts lead into what you occasionally title as NOUVELLE.ECOLE.ARCHITECTURE?
––It’s just a subtitle that I sometimes use for Le Montavoies, there’s also some attempt of a definition, but you should not understand NOUVELLE . ECOLE . ARCHITECTURE as a new school for architecture. I use these three words and ask people to change the order of these three words and to add several prepositions to generate thoughts, knowing that Le Montavoies is dealing with these three words: the NEW (the new human condition after the all-over installation of the digital), the SCHOOL (the institute, the building where old and young (can’t) meet, the impossibility of learning…) and ARCHITECTURE (the three dimensional space)
––Wim, could you say something more about the praxis which is effectively going on there in LeM.?
––Essentially it consists in walking to and fro, back and forth in the forest; in carting stuff along, like a homeless person, like a stranger––LeM. is not a home, it's a strange place. In the forest everyone is a stranger who is looking for scope…in the forest no-one knows what tree should be where. At the edge there is perhaps recognition, but in the forest the forest is the forest. In the forest nothing happens, nothing is wrong. You go there to die.
–––You're going to talk about LeM. as a purge?
––I will die. And I have the feeling that working on Le Montavoies makes that more acceptable than ever.––Anyway it all comes to make the forest a place, so that there are common places. Common places that could lure people out of their houses, like schools can. I keep on longing for no re-proaches, for ap-proaches…The forest work, that I do (often with one of these youngsters) is done in a ecological way which means rather not to make any inventories of forests, in order to exploit the forest, not become like people who know which trees grow where, who know how many cubic metres of timber there is per hectare and of what quality, who know what diseases affect the trees, what the subsoil is like.––Thus not to resemble the people who exploit the city, by knowing how many buildings there are, how well or how badly the buildings are fitted out, as they are the ones who know the value of the neighbourhoods…––That's the work, and there is also something like artistic activities…
––And there seems to be another coincidence with Fernand Deligny who considered himself to be more of a poet than a social worker…you also wrote a theatre piece: POOR BEING POOR
––Yes, it was when I was for a long week up at LeM. together with five homeless drug addicts and their dogs. We agreed to be together for that period as a film team, the homeless people would be the actors of their own role, I didn’t know what role I would take (director, camera, light…?), but there was one thing for sure and that was that we weren’t going to make a film. After the week that was quite exhausting, I hadn’t written down anything. Only much later I started to write. I wrote all these sentences that they kept repeating endlessly and that I could not forget and I mixed these sentences with some of the stories they had told me about themselves, stories that I couldn’t forget either. I wrote it down in their very strong dialect of Antwerp (that I don’t speak, but that I can imitate). The play is supposed to have five actors around one big table, together with the dogs. I read the text three times doing all the roles: once in a theater, once in the social workers place and once on the square in Antwerp where these guys were hanging out of and where the socialist mayor of that time had forbidden gatherings of more than three persons…
––Another attempt of talking by means of space in public space?
––Well, since I had realised more and more that only public space can be the existential space that I was aiming for, I also had realised that true contemporary art is public space since all this aspects of these kinds of space like need, existential, uselessness, without any direct economical value, violation of rules of society, etc––thus all these are items that are interesting and essential for contemporary artists…––Making place ( in the sense of making three-dimensional space and also in the sense of stepping aside ) is what contemporary art is about…
––So, you're going to further (ab)use art contexts to install public space?
–– In this text I wrote for J – A we made some «correction» of the public space definition and where I insist to talk about «space with a high degree of publicness» instead of plain talking about public space. And contemporary art is space with a high degree of publicness. Le Montavoies is my art. In «Le Mont Analogue» by René Daumal the editor added a few texts by Daumal. In one of them he’s asking: «mais qu’est-ce donc cet «Alpinisme analogique»? C’est l’art.» Nowadays I don’t say 'no' anymore when somebody from an art institute, a gallery, … calls me. I use their question often to force myself toward the theory, the thinking, that part of the praxis.
––And hindermost?
––I was recently working with a guy that comes from a psychiatric hospital, we were measuring the trees thicker than 30 cm on the land, we’re measuring the diameter of these trees, by putting a measuring tape around the tree, to do that you have to embrace the tree in a way…––then we measured the distance between two trees with a measuring tape, we measured the inclination (the slope), and then we measured the azimuth (an angular measurement of the direction)––I guess there must be 25.000 trees or so––a great useless work…
