You started a long-term project on Paris and urban changes as spectacle, which is much informed by situationist reading could you tell me more:

Arthur Crestani (AC): About two years ago I started photographing the Northern suburbs of Paris while going for walks outside the périphérique (the ring road around Paris). These are fragmented spaces, crossed by highways, train tracks and canals, which go back to the beginning of the industrial era in the Paris region in the 19th Century. The work has been focused on the Seine Saint-Denis, one of the three suburban départements adjacent to Paris, and by far the poorest. Also called the 93, the Seine Saint-Denis has a rich history going back to the French Monarchy, but later became better known for its polluted air and factories, for accommodating a largely working class population. The 1950’s and the 1960’s saw the erection of the grands ensembles, social housing estates for the workers and the middle classes, which became associated with urban decay and pressing social issues, such as the high levels of unemployment among the youth. A tipping point was reached in 2005 with the death of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, two teenagers hiding from police officers chasing them in Clichy Sous Bois, which sparked weeks of riots in similarly impoverished neighbourhoods across France. I tend to see these events as the founding moments of 21st Century France as the lack of political response to the social crisis was a missed opportunity to build a more equal society.
Due to this multilayered history, the 93 has been the subject of conflicting representations that resonate with French society as a whole, which was aptly encapsulated by the writer Aurélien Bellanger when he called it ‘the Rorschach Test of contemporary France’. A recent example goes back to last spring, when the French President Emmanuel Macron said the 93 was ‘California without the Sun’, in reference to its economic potential and to its infrastructure, in complete denial of the inadequacy of public services within the 93 and of the stigma attached to living there for its population.

© Arthur Crestani from the series 'Spéculaires', Saint Denis, The satellite antennas of the AB production company, 2018

© Arthur Crestani from the series 'Spéculaires', Aubervilliers, 2018

© Arthur Crestani from the series 'Spéculaires', Aubervilliers, Said before Arashiyama, 2018

The body of work I have been developing on the Seine Saint-Denis, called Spéculaires, is an attempt at addressing these conflicting representations through a documentation of urban spaces. It stems from a chance encounter with a street in Aubervilliers where the Letterist Internationale held its first conference in 1952, which ended with the conclusions of the conference being put in a bottle and thrown into the Canal Saint-Denis. Further up, this very canal nowadays passes in front of the Stade-de-France, where the French football team won the World Cup in 1998, the pinnacle of the myth of the French Republic as an assimilation of people of different origins and beliefs. The building of the stadium in the 1990’s was part of an urban renewal policy that led to the partial transformation of the surrounding industrial area known as the Plaine Saint-Denis into a business district.

© Arthur Crestani from the series 'Spéculaires', Saint Denis, The University, 2018

That the founders of what soon became the Situationnist Internationale used to wander across the same streets where I could contemplate the post-industrial transition of the Paris suburbs prompted me to look at space through the critical tools they had developed. I found the idea of spectacle as defined by Guy Debord in The Society of Spectacle, broadly defined as a social relation between people that is mediated by images, particularly relevant to question the urban processes at stake in the area, as it underlines that spectacle is a control mechanism. In a spectacular society, Debord points, urban space becomes an image and a commodity.

Guy Debord, 'Guide psychogéographique de Paris, Discours sur les passions de l’amour, pentes psychogéographiques de la dérive et localisation d’unités d’ambiance', dépliant edited by Bauhaus Situationniste, printed Permild & Rosengreen, Copenhague, may 1957.

This has been the starting point for an exploration of the making of space as an inherently visual process, especially in the light of the issues of surveillance in a capitalist setting. Urban space becomes a scene and a decor where fictions and myths may or may not play out. The project seeks to explore both the unusual and the common, the fictionalized and the commodified, the local and the exotic, in an approach that’s playful but critical of contemporary urbanism. It is an attempt at questioning what binds a society together and what threatens to blow it up.

The sporting success of the black blanc beur (Black, White, Arab) Football team was just one of the contemporary mythologies rooted in the matrix of the Seine Saint-Denis. The transformation of the warehouses of Aubervilliers and Saint-Denis into television studios in the 90s made sure that the vast majority of French entertainment shows, including very popular reality TV shows, were fabricated in the 93.
Unlike the rest of the metropolitan area, the Seine Saint-Denis retains a feeling of possibility, owing to its complex history. It is multicultural and hybrid. It can be many things and definitely is at the edge of French society. As the French rapper Médine put it in his song Grand Paris, ‘La banlieue influence Panam, Panam influence le monde’ (The suburbs influence Paris, Paris influences the world).

This very much is a work in progress, which I will keep going for a while, with an eye on the project of the 2024 Olympics, which acts as a catalyst for further developments and makeovers in the area, both a driver for urban capitalism and mass surveillance.

So you are saying that if you want to see how Paris is changing you have to cross the "ring". Which means that the city itself is living a process of "monumentalization"? It's a kind of mental prison when the city became a sort of stereotype experience based on tourist expectations... ParisPhoto as well I have the impression that feeds this kind of fake vision of the city.

AC: Definitely. Compared with other European metropolises, what we call Paris intra-muros, the urban area within the (now demolished) fortifications built in the 19th Century, is small and very densely populated. Paris is a congested city with few vacant spaces. It only accounts for 1.5 million people out of a 10 million strong metropolitan region. Given its urban history and the fact that the city received a dramatic upheaval in the 19th Century, with the opening of its avenues and boulevards, Paris offers little scope for new developments.
The walls have been replaced by the périphérique, the ring, as you may call it, which acts as a very clear border between the city and the rest of the metropolitan area, called the banlieue. Even though there is a very strong interdependence between Paris and its banlieues, with people constantly commuting from one to the other, there remains a substantial gap in the cost of living and wealth between the two.
The lack of vacant land and the high cost of real estate in the age of financial capitalism, when investors seek to purchase large parts of the estate stock as assets, makes life in Paris increasingly difficult to sustain. The process of monumentalization occurs as a result of strong regulations that protect the façades of buildings and prevent Paris from becoming like London and Brussels. Every local politician seems wary of turning Paris into a ‘ville-musée’ (museum-city) yet the city’s best asset remains its historical architecture, which draws the millions of tourists so vital to its economy.

As such the only major process underway in Paris is gentrification and the forced departure of the poor and middle-class families to the banlieues. So somehow the city could look the same in a hundred years if the architectural regulations remained the same, except that it would be more exclusive and expensive.

ParisPhoto, the manifesto, 2019 

This situation may cause this impression of experiencing a fake city when coming for events such as Paris Photo, in no small part owing to the location of the venues for these fairs, which mostly take place in the most expensive and prestigious parts of Paris. It would be difficult to have a real sense of what this city is about, or what the lives of the Parisians (and grand-Parisians) are like, from visiting the Grand Palais or the Louvre. It is very difficult, or even absurd, for an artist to live in Paris intra-muros, which lacks in space and where the rents are very expensive. The surrounding areas, replete with post-industrial settings, offer much better options in terms of studio space.

On the urban policy front, as I said about the Seine Saint-Denis, it is outside Paris that the most important urban transformations are under way. The Grand Paris Express is a late attempt at working at the metropolitan scale of the city. Under this scheme, 4 new metro lines are being built that will complement the regional train system in allowing commuters to travel within the metropolitan area without having to cross Paris as is the case today. This also opens up new opportunities for private developers keen to build housing in the vicinity of the future stations. However, it is hard not to find the new developments depressingly monotonous and uniform, especially in the light of the complex urban history they come to erase and replace. The Paris banlieues are replete with architectural experiments from the cites-jardins of the 1920’s and 1930’s to the modernist architecture of Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie, the monumental works of Ricardo Bofill or the delicate social housing projects of Iwona Buckowska, to name just a few. The state hardly ever supports such initiatives any more and as such a wonderful legacy of utopian architecture for the poor and the middle class is fading away.

© Arthur Crestani from the series 'Spéculaires', Saint Denis, 2018

The new neighbourhoods are only remotely linked with the history and identity of the places, such as Val d’Europe, a 50 sq.km town 30 kilometers East of Paris, built from the 1980’s within the framework of a public-private partnership between the State and Euro Disney due to its proximity with the theme park. It is a unique example of a privately built city in France, featuring neo-classical architecture (chosen for its ‘universal appeal’) and references to Tuscany. Parisian people might find it hard to believe Val d’Europe even exists as what happens outside of the city hardly gets any attention beyond the usual stereotypes. In fact, the centrality of Paris in the country makes any peripheral event irrelevant to the eyes of the urban elites (as opposed to the suburban, or periurban citizens), and as such the fate of cities like Val d’Europe, or even Saint-Denis, much closer to Paris, seem of little importance. It is still absolutely necessary to de-centralize ourselves if we are to make any meaningful contribution to the dialogues around the future of the city.

You have worked on one of the town that once were part of the "red belt". And it's a kind commissioned worked as well. Can you tell us more about this process and the series you have worked on? And finally what happened to the red belt?

AC: The development of industrial activity around Paris from the 19th Century resulted in a strong working class presence in the municipalities that came to form the ceinture rouge, or red belt, in the immediate vicinity of the city. The highest points in the history of the working class came during the 1936 and the 1968 strikes, which coincided with significant social gains with regards to labour conditions. The municipalities of the red belt had socialist or communist mayors, who developed the strategy of municipal socialism, using the municipal level as a space for resistance in a nation-wide capitalist system.

The industrious city of Ivry-sur-Seine, in the South East of Paris, used to stand out as a communist stronghold, thanks to its emblematic mayor Maurice Thorez also being the General Secretary of the French Communist Party between 1930 and 1964. Ivry’s communist pride was reinforced by the visit in the city of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961, who gave his name to one of the most remarkable social housing projects of the city (which is being demolished as I write).
Arthur Crestani from the series 'Cherchez la Nuit', Ivry,  Galilée #59, 2019

Arthur Crestani from the series 'Cherchez la Nuit', Ivry - Lampes #28, 2019

The deindustrialization of the Paris region from the 1970’s led to the progressive disappearance of the working class culture, as the factories shut one after the other. The 2008 financial crisis put the last nails in the coffin of industrial activity in the Paris region, but by then the red belt had long become a souvenir. Only in the Seine Saint-Denis does the Communist Party remain an important political player. In Ivry, the shutting down of industrial activities led to the abandonment of large parts of the city, which still features a number of derelict buildings squatted by poor families.

Arthur Crestani from the series 'Cherchez la Nuit', Ivry - Mercure #6, 2019

Arthur Crestani from the series 'Cherchez la Nuit', Ivry - Truffaut, 2019

Arthur Crestani from the series 'Cherchez la Nuit', Ivry - Le Monde #51, 2019

My work on the city, in the summer of 2019, was commissioned by the Collège International de Photographie du Grand Paris, an organization working to create a center for the preservation of photographic techniques and for experimentation with the medium. The Collège will be built in Ivry in a few years, as part of a redevelopment project on the site of a water treatment plant. The site is located in an area called Ivry-Port, sandwiched between the railway tracks and the Seine river, which has been going through an urban renewal programme. It started with the demolition of industrial buildings and the opening of large plots of land, in order to build new housing and office complexes. The city is transitioning from post-industrial urban decay to a more polished look, yet at the time of the work last summer it was the sudden emptiness that followed the demolitions that stood out.

I chose to photograph Ivry at night in order to work around the relationship between artificial lighting, space and the built environment in the context of this transitional phase. Early on I was surprised by how much went into the design of lighting in the newly built housing complexes, as if designed for a stage, which contrasted with my experience of the other parts of the city, where the light sources mixed up almost accidentally. I felt cajoled by these careful designs to a point of ridicule, while the more ad hoc lighting of the streets had me a lot more engaged.

Eventually, I set out to make landscape shots working with the darkness of the spaces opened up by the urban renewal policy, and details of spaces lit both by design and by accident. The making of the work was driven by the desire to critically look at the urban change in a post-industrial context, and at the erasure of the working class culture and history, embodied in a particular architectural form. The diversity of architectural types born out of the urbanism of the working class stands out against the more polished and geometrical designs of the new complexes. Working at night, eventually, was a way of reappropriating the spaces lost to the urbanization processes, but also to challenge my day-to-day relationship to the city.

You grew up in Paris. And you have relocated to the city, after a time abroad, and right after the dramatic attacks? Can you tell me how those events you feel have impacted on the city and people? And generally speaking, you mentioned me about an increase in poverty, humanitarian issues.

AC: I grew up in Asnières, a suburban town 5 km to the North West of Paris, and I did spend close to three years in India between 2010 and 2014, on and off. Paris and Delhi are the two cities I know. My reconnection with the city from 2014 more or less coincided with the dramatic events of 2015, both the attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on January 7th and the attacks on the Stade de France, the Bataclan concert hall and popular cafés on November 13th. A radical shift in the French political discourse ensued, and civil liberties have been under threat since, while the levels of violence have augmented, especially from the French police towards the population. The social movements of 2016 against a reform of the labour laws saw a rise in police brutality towards protesters, which became even worse with the yellow vests movement that started in November 2018 and has not receded yet, actually fuelling the current mobilization against the reform of the pension system. The extensive use of non-lethal weapons such as tear gas and LBD 40 (guns firing rubber ammunition) against the protestors has caused an unprecedented number of dramatic injuries, with virtually no accountability of the police. 

Libération, November 16th, 2015

In the meantime, Paris has been through a humanitarian crisis caused by the influx of refugees, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Eastern Africa, left with very little resources and shelter, who had to build makeshift camps under the aerial metro tracks, in the gardens and on the sidewalks of the North of Paris. The police have been regularly dismantling the spontaneous camps, even locking up with steel fences the areas where they used to camp to prevent the refugees from returning. As a result, the refugees have been progressively expelled from Paris intra-muros and have had to find shelter in slum-like areas located beyond the gaze of the Parisian people.

© Arthur Crestani from the series 'Spéculaires', Saint-Denis, The former office of the Humanité newspaper

Paris has become increasingly segregated between the poor and the rich, between the most fragile and the most affluent, a situation exemplified by the scary number of homeless people and families on the street. It is a very cruel city to live in at the moment. 

Going through such events has been traumatic to the city and its inhabitants, leaving various marks in collective psychology as well as in the urban fabric. To be in the city feels akin to being under siege, to an extent, with the regular sightings of military patrols, a recrudescence of gun-carrying officers, from police on the streets to security personnel in the metro system, the recurrent cacophony of sirens and the omnipresence of the police.

© Arthur Crestani from the series 'Spéculaires', Saint-Denis, La Montjoie, 2018

To live in Paris is a deeply schizophrenic experience as the increase in social and political violence is met with relative indifference by the economic and intellectual ‘elites’ that govern the city. Many realities cohabit on deeply dissonant levels, which exacerbates the absurdness of the experience.

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Arthur Crestani 
Arthur Crestani. Images contribute to the making of space. (Urbanautica Archive)
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