Among these, the London based artist/architect Céline Condorelli, combining a number of approaches that range from developing Supporting Structures to broader enquiries into forms of commonality and discursive sites and whose projects merge a mix of politics, fiction and public space, is contributing the piece Les Batailles du Centre (The Centre Wars) which consists in black and white slide projection with a double soundtrack, including a voice over, an extract of which is included below, and an audio track by Zafka from Condorelli's album Music for Museums.
Click here to download the audio track of Les Batailles du Centre
Forty years have passed since the Centre was inaugurated, and still everyone asks me to give my account of the experience which, at best, was considered a utopia, but more often an attempt to sabotage our culture, a threat to the fundamental values of our society...
Re-reading the newspapers of the time, the sarcasm of those on the right and the annoyed scepticism of the ones on the left, remembering the interventions of the parliamentarians, demanding for the orgies and the sacrilege to be stopped, and remembering the offended academics and the outraged parents, remembering the outcry of the bishops and the bitterness of the censors, the put-downs of the grammatologists and of the crumpled… etceteras.
But don't worry, I do not intend to come back on these subjects and all that has been said and written since, once utopia began to appear less foolish and thinkers started to engage with it anew, analysing it, and dissecting it, conceptualising it, lacanising it, demonstrating in short that it was not in fact a true utopia but just nonsense and emptiness.
It is therefore useless to attract attention to such rubbish, to the elaborations against it and for it: it would suffice to go to any library to find everything that has been printed on the subject. Above all, for us, what counts is what is done and lived rather than what is said: things count, not their appearance. So, what I would like to tell you here is about a story of what was done, of hurdles that had to be overcome, and moments of extraordinary optimism, for, isn't that actually what we expect from an account?
Voice-over text interpreted from Luca Frei, The so-called utopia of the Centre Beaubourg (Book Works and Casco, 2007) itself an interpretation of Gustave Affeulpin's La soi-disant utopie du Centre Beaubourg a pseudonym for Luca Meister's Italian translation 'Sotto il Beaubourg'.
Thank you to Wouter Davidts, Luca Frei, and Zafka.
