BRUIT DU FRIGO: LA VILLE PASSANT

FRANCESCA GOTTI: Bruit du frigo works on a variety of spaces, but you deal especially with leftovers, in-between spaces and underdeveloped areas; a challenging dimension. Your projects trigger the perception of what we share in urban landscape, of what can be perceived as a sort of collective platform.

HOCINE ALIOUANE-SHAW: From our own experience, the dimension of public space is the space-time framework where we can encapsulate our interventions. All our interventions take place in civic places, where interaction can happen. What is common in all our projects of the past 22 years is the use of these spaces to interact with citizens, to attract the attention of people who normally do not get involved, and to interfere with planning processes. We try to design scenarios of what is usually called “tactical urbanism,” where instead of delivering an already known process, we look for serendipity, crossing the unexpected, building profound matters on something that looks like intuition. Serendipity is only possible with interaction: we look at the city to transform spaces through bottom-up processes, nurturing these processes through people’s desires and frustrations.
Maybe to refer to in-between spaces we could use the term “unimagined” spaces, as opposed to planned or even over-designed spaces. These spaces participate in most of the dynamics happening in the city, but usually in a negative way. For us, instead they are the spaces of possibility: they are not over determined by functions or signification, so they are open for wandering and we can use them as mediums to involve people. People can look in a different way at their neighbourhoods, especially thanks to these places and the new meanings that our scenarios create: the problem is often a lack of representation, a lack of a sense of meaning. We don’t want leftover spaces to be fully redesigned and exploited, but rather we want to use them as fields of thought, where we and citizens can feel free to build a collective narrative. We want to open up scenarios for people to act on their environment in the future. In one of our projects, we set up a series of cabins in Bordeaux’s suburbia, connected to a system of tracking system: this idea is related to the master thesis written in 1995 by Yvan Detraz, the director of Bruit du frigo. During one and a half years of research, Yvan mapped all the forgotten spaces in the periphery of Bordeaux (brown fields, abandoned factories), spaces that had been discomposed by a highway built in the ‘70s. He wanted to question what could happen by connecting these places and how they could become the future public spaces of suburbia in the 2000’s: this really questioned the notion of public space.

FG: You mention participation and inclusion, and in 22 years of work you have experimented with different approaches, you have developed your own instruments of engagement and eventually these have changed through time. Do you recognise crucial elements of change?

HAS: Bruit du frigo has been using a wide range of activities but, in general, there is something which recurs constantly: there has always been an idea of using the knowledge we have, as architects, and putting it at the service of people who normally cannot have an impact on the environment they live in. The will which has been constant in our work is to express the needs of citizens and, furthermore, to co-think and co-build things with people. Some elements vary consistently each time we start a new intervention, and this especially depends on the team working on the project. We just came back from Casablanca, where we were working with students and people from a poor neighbourhood and there was an intense exchange between people: there, I realised once more that at the core of any project is the human dimension, the relationships and networking at all stages of an intervention. Most of all, we like to work with trans-disciplinary teams and this can take months of invisible networking as well, to connect with all the actors of a project. All the people, the associations and institutions for us are important resources of a territory, on a material and immaterial level. And, probably, what has allowed our practice to continue working for such a long time is the fact that we are investing constantly in the same territories: it is about territorialism, as defined by Alberto Magnaghi, a locally anchored approach, finding the means to identify people and structures within a community. We basically want to recall the dynamics of a community that got lost. And all the horizontal workshops we realise with people also require communication with institutions: to develop a bottom-up process, we first need to negotiate with those responsible for top-down actions (technicians and politicians), and only at the second stage can we bring them together. This is about governance: this is the step where we try to understand the decisional levels and reshape some administrative and intellectual barriers.

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Extract from the interview "A talk with Bruit du frigo: La ville passant" Full text available in the book "The Design of Tactics: Critical Practices for Public Space Re-Activation," forthcoming.