Paris-Gonesse Project n.02 Iris Lacoudre

The project came shortly after a residency at the Institute for Provocation in Beijing, supported by Iaspis, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, and continues Iris Lacoudre’s research on informal spaces: common places that can hold a “territorial intimacy” (Jean-François Chevrier) extending beyond the closed domestic sphere. Rather than applying a preconceived strategy, the project began by caring for the existing context, in two phases with no hierarchy between them.

The residency started as an inquiry within the existing walls into the many ways the people who inhabit the factory reinvent the uses and the programme of its rational architecture. This attentive survey took the form of conversations, drawings and maps, and also meant taking part in informal spaces and collective rituals – eating, exercising, praying, talking, smoking. Informal spaces become another layer of the factory plan: multiple “tactics”, in Michel de Certeau’s sense, through which each person appropriates the place.

In the second phase, a very small-scale intervention slipped into the factory’s uses to suggest and support an informal activity: a table made of tubular steel, like the assembly lines, that folds and rotates to host large shared lunches in many configurations, and folds away into a locker. The residency ended with a gathering in the factory around the unfolded table, laid with food, books and drawings, and with the plans drawn by the workers – so many layers of how the factory is perceived.