Local contemporain 04 english by laboratoire

CE N'EST PAS UNE ACTIVITÉ ORDINAIRE QUE DE S'INTÉRESSER À L'ORDINAIRE

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Photographer and artist, attentive to the sharp changes of the contemporary towns, she pays particular attention to the do-it-yourself survival instinct of the people from the megalopolis, that once caught the attention of Michel de Certeau. She works in the major cities of the world, from Johannesburg to Mexico, often in urban crisis situations, as in Chernobyl or Grozny.

Architect and townplanner based in Milan, he founded the international agency for territorial investigation, Multiplicity, and he teaches town planning at the Ecole Polytechnique of Milan and in Harvard. Since 2007, he is the editorial director of the review “Abitare”. He was previously the editorial director of the magazine “Domus international” (2004 – 2007).

Daniel Bougnoux Trained as a philosopher, today a professor emeritus, for many years he taught theories of communication at the Université Stendhal in Grenoble. Author of numerous books on the subject, he contributes to the review “Médium”. An expert on Aragon, he runs the publishing of his novels at the “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”.

Yves Citton French literature Professor at the University Stendhal in Grenoble, he has published several books and many articles about political philosophy and literary theory. His latest book is entitled “Lire, interpréter, actualiser. Pourquoi les études littéraires ?” (publisher Amsterdam). His previous book “L’envers de la liberté – L’invention de l’imaginaire spinoziste de la France des Lumières” (publisher Amsterdam) has won the Rhône-Alpes Book Award 2007. Laurent Grappe Musician and acousmatician composer. His work on the poetry of the taped sound has led him to write several acoustoelectronic works. As part of his work, he systematically creates specific instruments, creating a theatrical sound.

Bruno Latour Philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist, he is the scientific head of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, where he teaches. Author of many books about the sociology of sciences, he contributes to “Cosmopolitiques”, a review of political ecology. He is also the curator of several exhibitions, including “Iconoclash”. Bernard Mallet Lecturer in Sciences of Language at the Université Stendhal in Grenoble, he specialised in the questions of the acquisition of language and in the links between the development of thought and language.

Lionel Manga Epistemologist, an expert in words, this Cameroonian intellectual is passionately fond of contemporary culture. He has a column in the Cameroonian daily newspaper “Le Messager”. He regularly publishes articles dealing with various contemporary themes in several French-speaking reviews. Philippe Mouillon As an artist and designer of urban artistic events, he created Laboratoire sculpture-urbaine. Standing for a broader form of contemporary art, he designs transversal works on a global scale, connecting artists and intellectuals from the five continents to exchange and confront their own particular experience of the world. He is an associated professor at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble.

Janek Sowa After studying philosophy, literature and psychology in Poland, he turned towards sociology. A teacher and researcher at the University Jagellonne in Krakow, Journalist and publisher, he also curates exhibitions for the Centre of Contemporary Art Bunkier Sztuki in Krakow. Henry Torgue Composer and sociologist, he leads simultaneously musical writing and research. Head of the laboratory National Science Research Council « Architectural and urban moods» at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, he researches into the imagery of urban contemporary spaces.

Leading article

Authors geography Maryvonne Arnaud

Stefano Boeri

Social living is dominated by jeopardizing risk. Research confirms that our fellow citizens cite uncertainty as one of their major causes of distress. These days, our imagination is fed with this fear as it was fed by the nuclear threat during the Cold War or as the consciousness was - for a thousand years - relentlessly subject to the probability of hell. The emergence of this fear intrigues, notably because - as Zygmunt Bauman emphasizes - « each epoch owns its characteristic fears that differentiate it from other epochs or more precisely each epoch gives its own name to fears known by all the other eras ». What is happening then, to make us experience instability, unpredictability, uncertainty not as precious potentialities that can enlarge our destiny, but as tumours wasting our ordinary existence? Why isn’t uncertainty experienced as an ongoing reality of the human experience, instead of as a new threat? After the dances of death from the Middle Age plunged into war and great epidemics, the baroque era and its mannerism have hidden a huge worry that may have some links with our era. If today television and advertising sing the praises - through a playful, permissive and relaxed form - of a paradise affordable through a consumer spree, we are not totally naive because we remain consumed by our inability to think about our future. The most optimistic prospect we have about the future is to keep present the present, without dereliction. In that way, our temporal horizon becomes ephemeral, and the vulnerable people contribute perhaps to make this deadlock more visible. As in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, a furtive group infiltrates our streets and floats over the Mediterranean Sea. These people are surplus to requirement because they are insolvent and insolvency seems to be doomed to disappear, to renunciation, plain and simple oblivion. This radical uncertainty replaces the well-known and stable forms of social organisation by other ones, still stammering. It gives birth to a multitude of hypotheses which we have chosen to tackle by creating a network of artists and researchers spread in Europe. We invite you to discover here the first stage of this work of the aesthetic (re)composition of the social.

Philippe Mouillon

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"We only discern what we are interested in discerning, or more precisely what we are advised to look at, owing to our economic interest, our ideological beliefs, our psychological demands. We thus usually only make out clichés. But if our sensory-motor radar jams or breaks down, another kind of image may appear: a pure optical or sonorous image, a whole image without metaphor, that makes the thing itself spring out, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable aspect, because it doesn't have to

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be " justified " anymore, whether good or bad"..

Gilles Deleuze

Cinéma 2 – L’image-temps, Éditions de Minuit, 1985

What do you feel when you're uncertain? Fear? Contempt? Shame? Are you indifferent? Are you frightened at night? Are you afraid of winter? Are you afraid of others? Are you afraid of death? Are you afraid of tomorrow? Are you afraid of no more tomorrows? Are you afraid to catch someone's eye? Or are you happy to exchange a glance with a stranger? Do you close your eyes because it's too cold or to avoid seeing anything? Do you prefer when passers-by say hello or when they give you a coin? What do you remember? Childhood? Images of beggars in the Middle Ages that you saw at school? What made you insecure? Your previous life? What is more unbearable: catching

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someone's eye or being cold? What hurts the most: a stranger's compassion or his indifference? Smiles or threats? Do you prefer people walking by without seeing you or those who go round you without looking at you? Do you dream of being rich, of having a house, of building a fire in a fireplace? Do you remember your house when you were a child? Do you think of your mother? Or of the mother you didn't have? Are you ashamed when you're cold? Do you feel fragile? Do you feel as free as a bird? Do you feel like a wild animal? Do you think the world is barbaric? Do you still have hope? Do you feel that you stink? Do you get drunk on exhaust fumes? Are you aware you're in danger?

Do you feel threatened? Do you feel threatening? Do you wish to disappear? Do you look for help? Do you feel valued when people look at you? Do you feel despised when people look at you? Do you feel despised when you receive 10 cents? Do you think about the image you give of yourself? Do you like to be photographed? Or do you prefer to stay invisible? Do you feel ugly? Do you feel like smiling? Do you think you still have the right to smile? Do you feel like shouting when you hear people laughing when they pass by? Do you try to be frightening? Do you suffer? Do you act out your suffering? Do you pretend to pray? Do you believe in God? Do you think life is unfair? Do you

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find it disgusting to lie under dirty cardboard boxes? Do you set the world to rights when you lie under dirty cardboard boxes? Do you feel like rubbish when living amongst rubbish? Do you feel weak when living in a cardboard hut? Do you feel lost like Tom Thumb in the forest? Do you see the town as a jungle? Do you feel protected by your dog? Do you feel loved by your dog? Do you get more money thanks to your dog? Do you feel you're living like a dog? Do you feel love for something? Do you have to act when you're begging? Do you have to look humble and respectful? Do you study how to beg? Do you have to strike a pose to touch the passers-by? Do you have to plead with them?

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Do you have to pose as if you are praying? Do you think your life is a living hell? Do you wish to die as soon as possible?

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Do you dream of Paradise?

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Why do we wrap up in all this rubbish? Maybe it's a kind of ecological nest, like a cloth to snuggle up in… or it may be a bubble made from what others threw away which we don't want to discard again… or a nest that recreates a protective casing around the body…

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Why are we pretending not to see? Maybe because we feel we are party to that process of dereliction that compels this old woman to eat rubbish… or because we feel guilty about this shameful situation… or because we are afraid of facing the same destitution one day…

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The person in a position of social insecurity generally has less control over his image. The homeless person who lives on the pavement near my house is exposed to the rain, to frostbite, to exhaust fumes, but that person is also exposed to my scrutinizing gaze which silently but constantly asks: aren't you an impostor? The homeless person is above all exposed to this "power to judge ": he cannot shelter from this inquisition that seems always ready to accuse him of imposture, of irrationality, of deficiency. At the same time his image is suffering from frostbite, it is suffering from the exposure that subjects him to our scrutinizing gaze; all the small impostures our security allows us to hide. If destitution is characterised by the lack of control of one's image, it is simultaneously the place where the image is revealed and threatens the viewer. All our strategies of avoidance aim to stop us from meeting this gaze whose demand would be difficult to ignore. Within our strategies of avoidance, that both hide and reveal our confusion, something is watching us. What is it looking at inside us?

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Yves Citton

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What do you fear in social uncertainty? A physical decline or a deterioration of material conditions? Lack of support from your relatives? Loneliness? Humiliation? Scorn? The collapse of your family? The total failure of your life? The feeling of living a dull life? The absence of control of your future? The feeling that the border between what is precarious and what is stable is blurred? The feeling that we are all inhabited by insecurity and loss? Do we have to repress this feeling of our own precariousness or express it? Is the world simply divided into two: on the one hand, the insecure people who live in the street exposed to all dangers, and on the other hand, the secure people protected by their well-insured nests? Between these two categories, do crossings, lateral and secret communications exist? What frightens us the most in precarious people, our resemblance or our differences?

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What does being vulnerable mean? To have no home, or to be away from home? To be homeless or to be hopeless? To live in a hostile environment? Does "to be in a precarious state" mean not to understand the world, or not to understand one's place in the world? Not to have a personal world? Not to live in harmony with the world? To live in a misunderstood world? To live in a world that changes too fast? To be drowned by the incredible speed of the changes in social organisation? Does "to be in a precarious state" mean to live in a changing world, too mobile, too altered to adapt to? Does being insecure mean that you have lost control of your own world? That you are over-exposed? That you live curled up in a self-protective ball against danger? Does it mean to live without money or without trust? Under the suspicious eye of others? At the mercy of others?

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Does being vulnerable simply mean to be insolvent? Does having no money in a world where everything has a price forbid any kind of dignity? Does a society where everyone is equal in poverty know the notion of instability? Are there increasing degrees of vulnerability? Can one classify them? Organise them? Is the cardboard box the ultimate ecological recess? Is it satisfying to own more cardboard boxes when you live there? Are there lots of people who haven't lost everything and stay enclosed at home? Do they resemble us more than those who live on the street? Are they closer to us? Does the uncertainty we see everyday belong to our world or does it belong to the Third World countries? How can we understand this dislocation? Are the rich countries from the North beginning to see the reality which is only now beginning to spread to us? Can we talk about a situation of de-modernisation of the world where the countries of the outskirts forecast the future of the countries of the centre?

Social instability is only one half of the process. The other half is the disinterest, or the violence of the reactions aroused by the social instability in those who are at the same time indifferent, vaguely guilty, angry, this strange mix of impatience, embarrassment, confusion. We must pay attention to the invisible, to the way these people in social insecurity become invisible, because this is also a process. One has to make visible the process that gives rise to the invisible. When addressing the issue of uncertainty, one must also speak of what leads to vulnerability. It is truly the symmetry of analysis between both positions: those who are in a precarious position, and those who give rise to instability, as well as a steady change of scale that permits one to imagine a new objectivity. Bruno Latour

Destitution is a word that arouses sympathy, attention and sharing. Destitution means that you are looking for care, but this notion relates to a terminology swing that generalizes the clinical therapeutic model. One gives up the rhetoric of the class struggle and prefers to talk in terms of suffering, escheat, victims, and so on. Uncertainty is part of this swing: we are all psychologically unstable, we are all subject to collapse or stress disorders, we are also all organically vulnerable because life is uncertain by definition. And, associated with these two meanings, the social uncertainty - the endless fragility of our human condition - may become more "acceptable".

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Daniel Bougnoux

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Are the insecure people savages? Are they a new kind of barbarian? Have they returned to a primitive state or do they announce the forthcoming forms of the metropolis? Are they a residual or premonitory form of social organisation? Should we feel pity for them? What kind of feelings do we have? Fear? Contempt? Shame? Indifference? Do we feel better after giving a coin? What's the use of compassion? What's the use of finer feelings? Where does the confusion felt in the street when meeting a humiliating uncertainty come from? Where does the feeling that this instability is intimately watching us come from? What is watching us? How can we answer this look? Does the destitution of other people's look make us blind? Why is it easier to pass by a beggar who's sleeping or looking somewhere else than passing by a beggar who gives us a mute look? Who never changes his way in order to avoid a destitute person? How can we explain these strategies of avoidance? How can we explain this fear of facing this destitution? How can we answer this gaze?

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Habit is a garment that suits us so well. The more mechanical it is, the more reassuring it is. Chaos upsets us. The chaotic disconcerts us. Uncertainty throws a spanner in the works that breaks down the routine and its soothing effect. The keen sensitivity to the initial conditions of the dynamic systems provides several paths of evolution. Sailors all over the world know how much a tiny drift in navigation finally leads them very far from their course, sometimes to the antipodes. Keeping on course is not a metaphor, especially when the boat is pitching. Within ordinary human experience, if there is a dynamic system ruled by a keen sensitivity to the initial conditions, it is for sure the system composed of the skipper and his aim, the boat and its sails, the sea and the wind. The stabilities that have carried the world until now (with more or less success) are grounded by the agrarian vision of human records within the biosphere. The invention of agriculture has given us the principle of ties and accumulation. Ties to real and imaginary countries. Ties to a family. Ties to a nation. And now that the ties are breaking, stabilities are disintegrating and the permanence weakens. One can feel a kind of collapse, when roving from one job to another, from one house to another, from one love to another. Yet, hidden in the crinkles of reality and primordial is the risk, waiting to take as a sudden any random direction. Nevertheless, one can say that a new practice of autonomy is emerging from uncertainty.

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Lionel Manga

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Is instability photogenic? Why do advertising and fashion exploit these images of poor bodies and ruined buildings? Can photographs help them? Can photographs help to go beyond our finer feelings? Can photographs help us to understand better the reasons of precariousness? Do we have the right to take photographs of these people? Is it better to make them visible or to keep them safer in the haze? Do we have the right to stare at them? Do we have the right to have a suspicious eye? Do they feel supported when we look at them? Do they feel ashamed? Do they have any control on society? Aren't the vulnerable those who don't have any control on the world?

The flexibility of society today demands a permanent adjustment. In that sense, social uncertainty is the required form for the current development of capitalism. The world is always changing, but what is new is that it is the change which is now evolving. It is a meta-change, things are changing in a changing way, which is exponential and unpredictable. This accelerated alteration cuts across society, weakening the reference marks of most of the citizens and untying the different forms of social stability. The insecure person is disqualified. He doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t live in the world anymore, because to live in the world means to live in a slowly conquered space, from childhood, in order to become a kind of extension of ourselves. It also means to understand the world, what is happening, what is our place in the world. To live in the world means that you take care of yourself and that others take care of you. To live in the world means that you control the world, the background, the political space. It means being a citizen. So one can say that the symbols of social vulnerability are all the migrants cast on the roads of the world by events they couldn't control.

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Janek Sowa

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douala 2007

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WarsAW 2007

There are images of visible misery, and other images that deal with an unseen reality, for example images of people who choose to fade away. In order to interpret and understand, we must have an examining gaze, attentive to the smallest details that open all the possible paths, because social deprivation always results from a path that interacts with society. A discerning approach means to be attentive to a set of tracks that may be very small but that can absorb a great part of the world, like spongesâ&#x20AC;Ś Stefano Boeri

Here, there are so many possible paths. She is a kind of PietĂ surrounded by flowers in a majestic setting. Wild flowers look like a fragment of the landscape she has brought with her. But if these little bunches of flowers come from Holland, as part of the international market, so the meaning is completely different. If she doesn't have a crutch, the meaning is different, or if she smiles instead of being totally oppressed, like DĂźrer's Melancholia. Where does that pose originate? Where is one taught to sit on the ground like the Melancholia?

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Bruno Latour

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Anyone living in conditions of social uncertainty will feel that his body is a perpetual reminder: his body is either hungry, or cold or dirtyâ&#x20AC;Śthus his body is a prompt. The very definition of hell could be a body being a constant reminder, suffering, shrivelled up in a state of distress, whereas we have the means to place our body in a state of representation or put it to bed. Daniel Bougnoux

Hell means that the future doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist anymore! Uncertainty comes with the whole history of mankind. But today, the traditional elements of hope - space, progress, the future, the planet - are cracking. Is then the precarious nature of our towns becoming the haunting thoughts of how we will see ourselves in the future? The fear of the disenfranchised still belongs to the continuing era of opulence, when owning calibrates the quality of life and relationships. Now the time of instability, ephemera and movement has come, dictating new rules that re-size the spaces and the conditions of life, that rebuild social relationships and require the invention of new formulas of hope.

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Henry Torgue

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Do we only discern what we are interested in discerning? Are the mental frameworks making us live in a stable and calculable world hiding the real state of the world? Do we only discern reassuring clichĂŠs? Are we only able to assimilate clichĂŠs? How can one reveal the reality in itself, in all its ambiguity? How can we stop hiding the real world? Why aren't we facing the world when watching television? Do the mediadriven images come from too far for us to assimilate them? If we are informed about the world's destitution, why don't we want to change the world? Why do we choose to stay blind?

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Are poor people simple obstacles to avoid? Do they represent a threat for us? Are they used to make us bear the unbearable? Do they aim to call us to order? Do they manipulate us? Are they manipulated? Are there some Mafia organisations of begging? Why are there more and more destitute people on the street each year? Why do we only talk about them in wintertime? Do we have to talk about them? Do we have to forget them? Do we have to make them disappear? Do we have to destroy them? What is the link between precariousness and progress? Does the feeling of vulnerability come from the collapse of our belief in a better future? Who takes advantage of this fear?

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Is today's imagination fed by the fear of destitution, as our ancestors were threatened by the fear of hell, for more than a thousand years? Isn't hell reappearing today in the form of this growing uncertainty that hangs over our destiny? Where does that threat come from? Is it a necessary form of social organisation? What happens when a society that has believed in hell for such a long time doesn't live with this terror anymore? Aren't the bodies of these vulnerable people, constantly nagged by hunger, cold or dirt, similar to the damned bodies in the classical representations of hell?

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Our society dreams of being free-flowing. Our good relationships include transport, avoidance, evasion. But the general traffic collides with some kinds of obstacles, some persistent tumours. The homeless are an obstacle. They grow into tumours in the roads of transport and communication which is made up of the media. Daniel Bougnoux

The point is not to graft a superfluous question on painful - and sometimes tragic social situations. The point is - and this is no less problematic - to admit a deep ambivalence to social instability in our contemporary ways of thinking, that are at the same time used (because of an incredible social protection over the last 50 years) to regard existential security as a major benefit of modernity, and that are simultaneously (because of one hundred years of modernist aesthetic) used to view social insecurity as an essential demand. The destitution of our view of social instability has to be placed at the heart of this ambivalence: from this social uncertainty emerges a force of aesthetic desecuritization that leaves us bare. This experience which is drawn from our daily life is perhaps the chance to break away from our clichés and to possibly meet one another.

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Yves Citton

the balance of hazards, unpredictable, random, risky, uncertain, vulnerable, eventual, hypothetical, stochastic, indefinite, unbalanced, changeable, fickle, capricious, variable, wandering, fluctuating, undulating, rocking, hesitating, flowing, eventual, ephemeral, transitory, temporary, impermanent, short, transient, unsteady, arbitrary, vague, unclear, aberrant, fuzzy, intricate, risky, dangerous, crumbly, faltering, unstable, delicate Language warns, since it shakes, hesitates, reels and swells. Something is there, upside down, but language cannot explain it. Words, looking for other words that could give an answer. Not one bottle in the sea, but dozens, hundreds of them, to defeat chance, and to saturate its scattering.

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Bernard Mallet

the roaming, vagrant, tramp, wanderer, vagabond, traveller, nomadic, bohemian, hobo, gipsy, tzigane, itinerant, fairground stallholder, itinerant, mobile, strolling, roaming, prostitute, ragamuffin, prowler, free, uprooted, exiled, banished, expatriate, transported, fugitive, runaway, lost, adventurous, adventurer, madcap

the reject, poor, destitute, rejected, shabby, pathetic, useless, social outcast, unwanted, bumpkin, yokel, devil, downand-out, scarce, beggar, wretched, impoverished, miserable, villain, pariah, penniless, harlot, strumpet, trollop, whore, tart, slag, debauched, tramp, parasite, sponger, beggar, hobo, reveller, maniac, useless, gawker, brigand, robber, lazy, adventurous, plodder, destitute, poor, uprooted, bare, broke, insolvent, fleeced, indebted, bankrupt, destroyed

the suspicious, beggar, tramp, fille de joie, prostitute, trollop, whore, streetwalker, itinerant, street singer, prowler, lawbreaker, criminal, crook, highwayman, swindler, scoundrel, rogue, rascal, temporary, supernumerary

the free spirit, adventurous, tramp, reckless, rash, adventurer, lunatic, self-sufficient, unique, bizarre, madman, independent, eccentric, odd, free, mad, bohemian, traveller, vagrant, wanderer, street performer, vulnerable, beautiful, delicate

the spirit adrift, unresponsive, torpid, apathetic, lowly, humble, sad, moody, shy, hazy, vulnerable, reluctant, faltering, imprecise, unpredictable, unstable, changeable, unbalanced, broken, distressed, vacuous, inconstant, coward, fickle, feeble, upset, evasive, lazy, idle, misfit, dangerous, risky, unconventional, mad, insane, wild, lost, deficient, feeble

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the battered body, slim, soft, sweet, delicate, weak, weak-hearted, fragile, frail, skinny, feeble, scrawny, fairy, feathery, declining, refusing, damaged, broken, sickly, weakening, unstable, fragile, ruined, shaking, rocking, stumbling, falling, wavering, disabled, crippled, rickety, untidy, unhappy, bereft, despondent

the condition of deprivation, precarious, homeless, voiceless, penniless, broke, stony-broke, insolvent, deprived, poor, indebted, fleeced, small-timer, low wage earner, illegal immigrant, stateless, down-and-out, starving, unlucky, tramp, beggar, urchin, ragamuffin, unequal, imperceptible, moderate, modest, undecided, unsettled, doubtful, indiscernible, irresolute, indecisive, unsteady, difficult, faltering, doubtful, questionable, unreliable

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On the edge of the wood lived a poor woodcutter, his wife and their two children. The boy was called Hansel and the little girl Gretel. The family was starving. As the famine spread through was scarce, th thoughts. One happen to us? when we don

hout the country, and even bread he woodcutter was thinking black night he asked his wife: what will How can we feed our poor children, n't have anything for ourselves?

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The lack of a narcissistic image is at the centre of social instability. The mirror reflects such a bad image that one rejects that image. But this narcissistic stabilisation of our identity is extremely important: the news gives us the image of ourselves we produce daily, as a nation or a social group. When this image is missing, and it is missing in many cases, in the case of immigrants for example, and for so many countries who don't have the forms of media necessary to reflect this image, their own image taken by others; there is a risk of collapse. The struggle for a self-loving identity seems to be a main factor of the current symbolic struggles. The artist's duty is to show that we are not the only ones to inhabit our territory, but that there are some sliding between the territories, there are invasions and re-appropriations, struggles for identity and coexistence. Because each territory is too much inclined to make itself homogeneous, chauvinistic, afraid of others; the narcissistic question is vital: we need to see ourselves in a mirror, but not alone, not filling up all the visual space, but to see ourselves linked with others, who validate us being there and sharing the space with them.

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Daniel Bougnoux

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plaire a soundscape by Laurent Grappe, can be heard on the site www.local-contemporain.net/audio04/

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" When you're hard-up, you're fragile. It's hard to get well and your health deteriorates. I cried the day the dentist made the dentures I needed. These dentures for the poor are awful: they look like a block of buildings. Well, the advantage could be that: dentures that allow you to smile, because it's terrible not to be able to smile."

We don't really have the mental geography which corresponds to where we are today. This diffused peril is linked with globalization. And the problem with globalization is that; apart from a few works, the intersection between political, scientific and artistic representations of the global scene remains the fundamental question. That is really the common challenge of intellectuals and artists.

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Bruno Latour

IMAGES GEOGRAPHY MARYVONNE ARNAUD

1: Lyon / December 2007 3: Grenoble / April 2003 5: Paris / november 2007 6: Cologne / september 2007 7: Paris / november 2007 8: Palermo / april 2007 9: Paris / november 2007 10: Grenoble / february 2007 11: Warsaw / june 2007 12: Gdansk / october 2007 13: Warsaw / june 2007 15: Warsaw / june 2007 17: Paris / november 2007 19: Warsaw / october 2007 21: Paris / november 2007 22: Grenoble / august 2007 24: Grenoble / march 2003 25: Grenoble / august 2007 26: Grenoble / may 2006 29: Grenoble / november 2006 31: Grenoble / march 2003 33: Warsaw / june 2007 34: Pieter Bruegel / 1568 38: Douala / december 2007 39: Warsaw / june 2007 40: Albrecht Dürer / Melancholia / 1514 44: Warsaw / may 2007 45: Warsaw / october 2007 51: Palermo / april 2007 52: Paris / december 2006 56: Lyon / october 2007 57: Lyon / october 2007 58: Grenoble / september 2007 59: Grenoble / september 2007 60: Lyon / september 2007 61: Lyon / october 2007 62: Lyon / december 2007

LOCAL.CONTEMPORAIN 1, rue Jean-François Hache 38000 Grenoble contact@local-contemporain.net www.local-contemporain.net LOCAL.CONTEMPORAIN is initiated by LABORATOIRE, 1, rue Jean-François Hache 38000 Grenoble (LABORATOIRE produces urban-scale artistic events, from Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg, Algiers or Sarajevo and runs territorial studies for cities such as Fort de France or research departments such as the DAPA-Ministère de la culture or the PUCA-Ministère de l’écologie) www.lelaboratoire.net

PUBLISHER Philippe Mouillon EDUCATIONAL COORDINATION Eve Feugier SURVEYS IN EUROPE Anna Wieczorek, Hanene Ben Slama, Rainer Kazig POLISH TRANSLATION Bogena Pieskiewicz, Anna Wieczorek GERMAN TRANSLATION Stefan Barmann, Sybille Petrausch ITALIAN TRANSLATION Giada Sottomano ENGLISH TRANSLATION Pascaline Garnier, Lucia Wilson CATALOGUE DESIGN Pierre Girardier, Pablo Boulinguez, Philippe Borsoi COPY EDITING Pascaline Garnier

In partnership with the CONSERVATION DU PATRIMOINE DE L’ISERE, MUSEE DAUPHINOIS, 30, rue Maurice Gignoux 38031 Grenoble (The CONSERVATION DU PATRIMOINE DE L’ISERE, department of the Conseil Général, works towards a new definition of heritage, between the preservation of the relics from the past and their current use) www.patrimoine-en-isere.com

PRINTING IMPRIMERIE DES DEUX-PONTS, Bresson BP 500, 38326 Eybens Cedex France A PUBLISHING LABORATOIRE 1, rue Jean-François Hache 38000 Grenoble ISBN 2-9516858-0-7 / DEPOT LEGAL MARS 2008 © LABORATOIRE - TITLE AND CONCEPT © THE AUTHORS - THE TEXTS © MARYVONNE ARNAUD - THE IMAGES

The texts making up « Fragility: today’s questions » are the retranscription of the debates resulting from the series « atelier-fragile », a European-wide work in collaboration with artists and philosophers, that took place in July 2007 at the Ecole SCIENCES POLITIQUES in PARIS then in September 2007 at the time of PLAN-PROJECT, COLOGNE. The participants were: Maryvonne Arnaud, Stefano Boeri, Daniel Bougnoux, Yves Citton, Laurent Grappe, Isabella Inti, Kay Von Keitz, Bruno Latour, Lionel Manga, Bernard Mallet, Philippe Mouillon, Janek Sowa, Nicolas Tixier, Henry Torgue, Federica Verona, Sabine Voggenreiter, Joanna Warsza. This series will continue in 2008 mainly in GDANSK, MILAN and GRENOBLE.

This issue 4 of LOCAL.CONTEMPORAIN is published with the support of: la FONDATION DE FRANCE, le MINISTERE DE L'ECOLOGIE, DU DEVELOPPEMENT ET DE L'AMENAGEMENT DURABLES (PLAN URBANISME CONSTRUCTION ARCHITECTURE), la REGION RHONE-ALPES, le CONSEIL GENERAL DE L’ISERE, la METRO, la VILLE DE GRENOBLE, and the collaboration of: PLAN-PROJECT (COLOGNE), MULTIPLICITY (MILAN), WYSPA INSTITUTE OF ART (GDANSK), MUSEE DE GRENOBLE.

PHOTOGRAPHS Maryvonne Arnaud EDITORIAL COORDINATION Maryvonne Arnaud, Bernard Mallet, Philippe Mouillon, Henry Torgue

We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really have the mental geography which corresponds to where we are todayâ&#x20AC;Ś. It is this acknowledgement made by the philosopher Bruno Latour when we first met that gave birth to this wish to make visible the mechanisms of interpretation and representation of a reality that fades away. We have chosen to deal with the uncertainties of today in order to test this fragility of the mechanisms of the representation of the world, the paradox of a society that is so fond of images and information. Beyond the obvious and painful social vulnerability, poverty today stands out as one of the main polarities of European social imagery. When a study made in France in December 2007 confirmed that more than 50% of our fellow citizens quote uncertainty as one of their major causes of distress, we think that this fear is beyond poverty. In order to be able to live in the world and to act in the world, one has to understand the mechanisms that produce this contemporary fear. Artists and philosophers across Europe are invited here to work on this aesthetic (re)composition of the social. Gdansk, Warsaw, Cologne, Milan, Palermo, Paris, Lyon and Grenoble are the territorial roots of this first stage.