# Scènes de Nuit: Night & Architecture

Javier Fernandez Contreras, Youri Kravtchenko, Manon Portera

## ► To cite this version:

Javier Fernandez Contreras, Youri Kravtchenko, Manon Portera. Scènes de Nuit: Night & Architecture. Javier Fernández Contreras; Youri Kravtchenko; Manon Portera. Ediciones Asimétricas; HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), 2021, 978-84-17905-69-9. halshs-03626123v2

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Submitted on 28 Jun 2022

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

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# Scènes de Nuit. Night & Architecture

Javier Fernandez Contreras

► To cite this version:

Javier Fernandez Contreras. Scènes de Nuit. Night & Architecture. Javier Fernández Contreras; Youri Kravtchenko; Manon Portera. Ediciones Asimétricas; HEAD - Genève, HES-SO, 2021, 978-84-17905-69-9. halshs-03626123

HAL Id: halshs-03626123

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03626123

Submitted on 11 May 2022

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

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SCÈNES & NUIT
Night Architecture
Nocturnal Exhibition at f'ar Lausanne – May 2019

25

SCÈNES DE NUIT

An introduction by Javier F.
Contreras and Youri Kravtchenko

49

SHOP. 09.05.2019. 7PM.

GUESTS: SUKHDEV SANDHU,
MARTIN KOHOUT

Scenography: Rui-Filipe Bernardes
Da Silva, Alizé Fassier, Clémence
Lablancherie, Gaïane Legendre,
Raphaëlle Marzolf

77

FILM. 12.05.2019. 8PM.

GUESTS: MATTHIEU BAREYRE

Scenography: Shana Bennett, Elisa
Cuddré-Mauroux, Nemo Reitz, Nora
Rhyner

105

CITY. 18.05.2019. 10PM.

GUESTS: ISABELLE CORTEN,
STALKER / OSSERVATORIO
NOMADE

Scenography: Audrey Besanceney,
Emma Birbaud, Emma Launay,
Antoine Matta, Thu Trang Nguyen

129

CLUB. 24.05.2019. 11PM.

GUESTS: POL ESTEVE CASTELLÓ,
OCTAVE PERRAULT, DANIEL
ZAMARDBIDE

Scenography: Taomei Bengone,
Astrid Mayer, Deborah Marolf,
Camille Nemethy, Julie Reeb, Annika
Resin

169

FOOD. 29.05.2019. 9PM.

GUESTS: JULIEN ZANETTA,
COLLECTIVE DOMINGO

Scenography: Tania Bersier, Rafael
Donoso, Noémi Dux, Shanna
Lancian, Clara Losey

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CORNER SHOP
MILLE ET UNE NUITS

Alimentation générale - tabacs - boissons - snacks

4
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## ÉNÉS DE NUIT

rencontres nocturnes autour du rôle de la nuit dans la construction des se-
bours espaces urbains. Autour des thématiques de la consommation, de la braille,
du repas, Sèvres de Nuit recréés des espaces génériques de pratiques et de
nénements SHOP, FILM, CITY, CLUB et FOOD développement des laboratoires d'un
questionner la relation entre l'architecture et la nuit.

dans les printemps, le F'NR invite les architectes Jérôme Ferrandie, Cédric Bono et Noé
proposition Scènes de Nuit. Monde avec les duchartres et du premier anniversaire d'Ancien
Genève, Sèvres de Nuit tente de comprendre les phénomènes spécial nocturnes
sessions, prénominés, repas et projections.

bacterial encounters around the role of night in the construction of consumer
spaces. Around the themes of consumption, city, enclosed spaces, party and
spaces generating practices and night initiatives. The five events SHOP, FILM, CITY
spaces laboratories to bring together and question the relationship between
the F'NR invite architects Jérôme Ferrandie, Cédric Bono and Noé Bono.

Nuit. Conducted with the first year students of architecture of the HEAD-Génoise,
understand the phenomena of space through conferences, discussions, walks, meals
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SCÈNES & DE NUIT
NIGHT & ARCHITECTURE
Nocturnal Exhibition at f'ar Lausanne
Javier F. Contreras and Youri Kravtchenko

For centuries, architectural theory, discourse and agency have been based on daylight and solar paradigms. References to the night in Vitruvius' *De architectura* (30–15 BC), widely considered the founding text of Western architectural theory, are residual, and they are similarly absent in the most influential Renaissance treatises, i.e. Leon Battista Alberti's *De re aedificatoria* (1452) and Andrea Palladio's *I quattro libri dell'architettura* (1570). Likewise, the seminal writings on modern architecture rarely refer to the night-time environment, which can be evaluated both textually and photographically. In this sense, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock's *The International Style* (1932), the book resulting from the MoMA exhibition that introduced modernism to America, illustrates a clear preference for daytime images¹, noting that “the photographs and the plans were for the most part provided by the architects themselves”². This diurnal rationale is further discernible in the books that established the intellectual ethos of architectural modernity, i.e. Nikolaus Pevsner's *Pioneers of the Modern Movement* (1936) and Sigfried Giedion's *Space, Time and Architecture* (1941), where less than 5% of the images are purely nocturnal, understanding the term in the circadian sense of absence of daylight. Accompanying texts only help to emphasise this nocturnal obliteration. Likewise, the canonical architectural history books published in the last sixty years, such as Leonardo Benevolo's *Storia dell'architettura moderna* (1960) and Kenneth Frampton's *Modern Architecture: A Critical History* (1980), have institutionalised the diurnal episteme in architectural media.

In the second half of the 20th century, authors such as Reyner Banham, Venturi and Scott Brown, and Rem Koolhaas corrected to a certain extent the invisibility of the night in architectural theory
with influential books such as *The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment* (1969), *Learning from Las Vegas* (1972) and *Delirious New York* (1978), which partially examine the role of technology and the night in the construction of modern domesticity and leisure culture in Western architecture. From apartments to offices, casinos to nightclubs, movie theatres to theme parks, these texts emphasise how the identity of contemporary human beings and their associated domestic, professional and cultural spaces are inseparable from the night. In the 80s, extensive audiovisual and written research was carried out on the 'night as a heterotopia', as illustrated by the in-depth investigations of dystopian cinema, such as the films *Escape from New York* (1981) or *Blade Runner* (1982), which explore the qualities of darkness, indefiniteness and the uncanny aura of architecture in the absence of sunlight. Night is somehow seen as an 'other' (hetero) space, i.e. disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, and transforming the regular condition of the human habitat. In recent decades, significant contributions have been made by John A. Jakle in the book *City Lights* (2001), Dietrich Neumann in *Architecture of the Night* (2003), Edward Dimendberg in *Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity* (2004) and Jonathan Crary in *24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep* (2013). In the latter, Crary explores how sleep, through its very existence and progressive reduction in recent decades, has become the last remaining bastion of resistance to the increasing monetisation of human activity in market economies. In the same vein, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings openly declared in 2017 that "we are competing with sleep, on the margin, it is a very large pool of time"³, envisioning human biology as the biggest challenge to his company's market.

These references typify the extent to which the identity of contemporary human beings and their domestic, professional and cultural spaces are inseparable from the night. However, as of today, contemporary architectural media, including the most

influential magazines such as *El Croquis, Apartamento, or A+U*, still present theory and photography where more than 90% of the pictures are taken in the daytime. Accompanying essays rarely refer to night spaces, not to mention night-time activities and associated behaviours. Of all the architecture binaries held worldwide since the Venice Biennale was inaugurated in 1980, not one has been dedicated to the night; yet the night has been the most important laboratory of architectural experimentation since the invention of artificial light in the 19th century, prompting an endless intensification of human activity that has forever transformed the means of material, cultural and spatial production.

*Scènes de Nuit* aims to examine and contest the obliteration of night in architectural media. This publication is the result of the eponymous exhibition held in May 2019 at f'ar (Forum d' architectures) in Lausanne. Curated by Javier F. Contreras and Youri Kravtchenko, with the assistance of Manon Portera, the exhibition explored the role of the night in the construction of contemporary cities and societies, illustrating how architectural theory and critique are still nowadays associated with sunlight and diurnal paradigms. The venue addressed the technology, networks and forms of design deployed in nocturnal architectural spaces and their associated communities, engaging with both local and global audiences through a broad network of practitioners and theoreticians in architectural and night design as well as experts from different disciplines relevant to understanding the intersections between space, night and society at large, such as the arts, anthropology, sociology, economics and media studies.

The approach was typological, namely understanding types as forms of continuity and specificity running through the history of architecture. If type was associated with natural forms by Quatrèmere de Quincy in the 18th century, with geometric and tectonic elements by J.N.L. Durand in the
19th century, and with programmes and functions by Le Corbusier in the 20th century⁴, can we admit the specificity of night types and explore their implications for architectural discourse in the 21st century? Further still, contemporary technical conditions no longer aim to artificially replicate a natural night. Instead, they create ‘night scenes’, i.e. new living environments that are more than a simple imitation of diurnal life. The exhibition sought to address the architectural issues arising from these night scenes.

The venue at f'ar Lausanne was only open for five evenings, proposing a mutable scenography that changed according to the night types to be discussed, explored and performed. The five scenes—SHOP, FILM, CITY, CLUB and FOOD—recreated spaces generating practices and night-time rituals on the topics of consumption, cinema, street, party and food culture, becoming experimental laboratories to gather data and question the relationship between architecture and the night. Research was developed through events in various formats, temporalities and conditions, focusing on nocturnal architectural spaces through, but not limited to, inhabited scenography, performative exhibitions, international conferences, debates and screenings. The project contended that there is no difference between format and content, between the production of knowledge related to the night and the scenography of night. The above-mentioned night types were directly tested at actual events. In the manner of Period Rooms that reconstruct interiors from a specific period, typological and fragmented scenes in various scales were physically created to sit at the heart of stimulating night-time experiences. These new referential spaces, both narrative and scenographic, were used for discussion and research purposes.

spaces, activities and media found in night culture, using evening events and ephemeral sets as the main display platform.

**SHOP. 09.05.2019. 7PM.** The Corner Shop may arguably be the ultimate night-time institution. Typically open when other shops are closed, its cheap disruption of the circadian rhythm was explored by proposing a spatial immersion into a reconstructed replica, where sociologist Sukhdev Sandhu and artist Martin Kohout discussed their vision of nocturnal working conditions.

**FILM. 12.05.2019. 8PM.** What makes the Film Theatre an extraordinary place is its capacity to isolate the audience from night or day, creating a space of endless temporality. Within an immersive scenography of cinematic boxes, director Matthieu Bareyre presented his latest film *L'époque*, discussing with Youri Kravtchenko the entanglements between night, space and architecture.

**CITY. 18.05.2019. 10PM.** The lighting aspect of the City is perceived as a parallel space-time to be experienced through lit and unlit territories. How has artificial light affected nightlife? What influences does light have on safety and night-time activities? This event explored those questions through a presentation by Isabelle Corten, lighting designer, and a nocturnal walk led by the Stalker Collective/Osservatorio Nomade in the city of Lausanne.

**CLUB. 24.05.2019. 11PM.** The Club both epitomises the nocturnal public agora and constitutes the ultimate laboratory for technological and multimedia experimentation. Ensconced in a one-night club where visitors were encouraged to explore and perform the nocturnal space, architect Pol Esteve Castelló reflected upon nightclubs as architectural types, while Octave Perrault elaborated on the Cruising Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Biennale.
FOOD. 29.05.2019. 9PM. Restaurants and bars are the defining nightlife meeting places, scenes of complex human rituals skilfully constructed through interior architecture. Researcher Julien Zanetta described banquet rituals and associated human behaviours throughout history, the point of departure of a special dinner served on a long banquet table crafted for the occasion.

Designed by students in HEAD – Genève's BA in Interior Architecture programme, the scenography at f'ar Lausanne was not just a backdrop to the exhibition but rather a prop to stimulate and provoke discussions on the proposed topics, envisioning the architecture event as a place to collectively produce knowledge. Capturing fragments of nocturnal images has often been the field of exploration of photography, painting, cinema and literature. At f'ar Lausanne, we proposed to capture and reconstruct the night in various scales. The production of nocturnal spaces and fragments, whether inhabited, experimented with or observed, allowed us to grasp their most subtle properties, not only in the process of research and construction but also in the experience of the spaces thus produced. For each event, students designed a scenography that could change as a prototype of space and vice versa, exploring the night through tools used in architecture and theatre, such as building models, sets and fragments of space in different scales. The sampling and reconstitution of the scenes was carried out according to three protocols of demonstration: *Walking in* and *Looking at*, appropriated from Milica Topalovic's seminal essay "Models and Other Spaces"⁵, and *Catching in*, borrowed from our own memories and interests. The methodology we proposed was based as much on the process of research/observation of fragments of nocturnal spaces (generally originating from photography or cinema) as on the unifying and knowledge-bearing events they generated.

**Catching in.** This process focused on how collective memory shapes the recollections, emotions and perceptions produced by the built environment, the lived space. It represents the ruin, or part of the space that could be assembled by a nocturnal flaneur. The sampling of fragments is the result extracted from image-spaces, becoming a catalogue of polyphonic elements such as relics, pictures, photographs and documents, which together generate a collective memory of what night is.

**Looking at.** Models in smaller scales are uninhabitable and can only be perceived by the eye and the imagination. Models in varying scales make it possible to produce a new image from a miniaturised space, broaching issues such as the relationship between their representativeness and objecthood, their dependence on and potential autonomy from full-scale architecture, and their detachment from the human body and sense of visual inhabitation.

**Walking in.** As fragile as theatre sets, dioramas and art installations, 1:1 scale models, also known as life-size models, allow for the creation of observable and experimental three-dimensional freeze-frames in circumstances that simulate night-time reality through the artifice of construction. These types of models to be experimented with are as familiar as they are remote. In this sense, the scenography at f'ar Lausanne was simultaneously representational (directly alluding to iconic archetypes), manipulative (deforming them both visually and spatially) and autonomous (becoming both the content and the objective of their own representation).

The scenes, fragments and discussions presented here highlight partial and fragmentary tales of a semantic, physical night of which much remains to be told. From this perspective, this book represents a beginning. Its authors are aware that much more has been left out than could be included and that many topics, given the limited time and space
allowed here, could not be addressed. The exploration of contemporary and past habits in the use of night spaces is limited to a few cases that can shed but limited light on the nocturnal scenes of interiors, furniture, objects and constructions that clubs, restaurants, shops, cinemas and urban fragments provide. Our hope is that this volume, and all it does not contain, will inspire those who read it to study these galaxies and in them draw stimulating new night-time constellations.

1 Only four images out of 83 photographs show artificially-lit spaces: Alvar Aalto's Turum Sanomat building, Uno Ahren's Flamman Soundfilm Theater, Marcel Breuer's Berlin apartment, and Jan Ruhtenberg's living room in Germany. See: Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, *The International Style* (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1932/1995).

2 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, *The International Style* (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1932/1995), 9.

3 Aatif Sulleyman, “Netflix’s biggest competition is sleep, says CEO Reed Hastings”, *The Independent*, April 19, 2017.

4 For a discussion on typology throughout the history of architecture, see: Rafael Moneo, “On Typology”, *Oppositions*, no. 13 (1978): 23–45.

5 Milica Topalovic, “Models and Other Spaces”, OASE #84, Maquettes / Models (2011): 37–45.

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S H O P

Think about the corner shop. It is open 24/7 in Asia, in America and in most European cities. Is there anything more different from the traditional market, the bazaar, the agora, than the corner shop? Always open, always recording, always collecting data in different locations. It represents an urbanism of fragments, of places that are not physically connected.

Defined as a multifaceted space that is open both during the day and throughout the night, the corner shop is an iconic place that connects the inhabitants of a neighbourhood physically and psychologically. Present in all major cities, it is identified by its highly codified visual identity and signage, through elements such as the artificial light of the 'open' signs, the mix of items for sale, and the background music and radio, often in the language of origin of the manager. The corner shop is representative of humans' transition from daytime to night-time beings because it symbolises the evolution of consumption. This type of infrastructure leads to changes in the nocturnal appearance of cities and the way one consumes them, raising many social, political and economic questions.

Like the reconstruction of a crime scene, students created a perfect *trompe-l'oeil* in the form of a corner shop as real as it was fake, whose elements were all made from cardboard in 1:1 models, like realms of a distorted popular vernacular, i.e. an inhabitable Thomas Demand's model. Neighbours were confused, entering to buy goods that did not exist, while visitors to the exhibition could not find the venue: "Is this where f'ar Lausanne used to be?"

In this conversation, Sukhdev Sandhu, founding director of the Center for Experimental Humanities at New York University and author of the book *Night Haunts: A Journey through the London Night*, and artist Martin Kohout, author of the project *Night Shifts*, discussed their latest vision of nocturnal working conditions and the corner shop as a night-time institution.

Curatorial assistants: Josephine Devaud, Julia van de Graaf

Students: Rui-Filipe Bernardes Da Silva, Alizé Fassier,

Clémence Lablancherie, Gaïane Legendre, Raphaëlle Marzolf

HEAD - Genève Interior Architecture Department

Photos: © Jerlyn Jeinzen, Lea Kloos, Baptiste Coulon

A
SUKHDEV
AND
MARTIN

f'ar Lausanne, 09.05.2019

Sukhdev Sandhu It's slightly embarrassing being here. When I was younger, being associated with corner shops was the worst thing you could

BETWEEN
SANDHU
KOHOUT

ever imagine. Many members of my family worked in corner shops, and my biggest fear in life was to work in a corner shop. It was to be downwardly mobile, to be boxed, and segregated—economically, socially, imaginatively—with 'foreign' people, people who were regarded as parasites and vermin. Lots of jokes at me, and friends like
me, we're all through the prism of the corner shop. They were jokes about why Romans used to build straight roads: because they didn't want Pakis to build corner shops. So you imbibe all this stuff, and you think the corner shop is a blank space, a boring place, a space that is just for people who have failed in life—not anything utopian or anything of interest.

At the same time, I also used to look inside when many of these corner stores were closed at lunchtime. These days lunchtimes become harder and harder to sustain. But corner stores often used to have lunchtimes. I would sneak off from my school and go to various corner stores and look through the windows. There were magazines on the top shelves with people with no clothes on. I thought, that's great! And there was chocolate, and there were books and all these things, and it felt like a museum, it felt like a playground, it felt like a pleasure dome, it felt like an aspirational space. And so, these two elements combined, corner shops as real spaces entangled with history, with geography, with politics, but also, as kind of weird, dreamy, perverse spaces rich in imagination and longing and your own fucked-up head.

And weirdly, while watching the films just now, I had exactly that same feeling about night-time. Night-time as a space which is local, which is very real, which is about labour, exploitation, self-exploitation, technology, and history, but also, maybe because the lights were down, a place that felt very moody and eerie, and dreamy, and ghostlike, not a real space. It's this dialogue between the real and the unreal, the real and the surreal, which is part of the mystery and magic that comes up when thinking about the night-time.

In many ways, all of this was kind of anticipated by Karl Marx. I didn't think I would ever say that! Here though is a quote from *Das Kapital* in 1867, about factory life in the north of England and why more and more employers, industrialists,

were trying to make evening shifts compulsory. “The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour.”¹ I love the idea that there is a natural day, and of course, part of what we are talking about here today is a relegation of the category of the natural. I like this idea of a vampire sucking the blood of as many people as it can. In this extract Karl Marx isn't just talking about women or about men, or boys. He goes on to say: “Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of the body and the mind, even the rest time of Sunday, what foolishness! But in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day.”²

Now, if you haven't read Marx, you probably think this is *not* how he writes. Because this isn't just political theory, or just economics, or some philosophy; this is science fiction, this is a horror film, and this is speculative fiction. Stephen King couldn't do better. And there is a kind of excitement in this. The more his prose gets excited and overheated—he's describing something terrible, unnatural and awful—and you can see he kind of wants it to happen, a little bit. And, in a way, when we talk about night-time, even now when we are complaining about the various conditions and various situations, we want it to be even more dreadful. We want it to be a horror slide show, a place full of ghouls and dreadfulness. And in the 19th century—and before then—books, texts about the night-time were always about horrors, about dreadfulness. It was a kind of gothic show.

My project, which I did a while ago, about night-time, it came from a different place. But it makes more sense now because of the work you've all being doing—and us here this evening. My training is in

literature, and so I didn't think with my eyes, I didn't trust my feelings; I was, in today's language, not an interdisciplinary person. I've written a lot about immigration from the former colonies to the United Kingdom over the last thousand years. I did so through books because that's what my education had taught me: books were the only meaningful form of archive, the only form of evidence. So you're always looking at written traces. And increasingly that felt incomplete. I wanted to use my legs, I wanted to use my ears, I wanted to learn to talk to people, I wanted to expose myself to situations and experiences that tested my very conventional, very boring critical abilities.

Many of my colleagues and friends thought I was a bit stupid. I don't know if you felt this. Because night-time seemed very simplistic. Night-time was a kind of a banal category: it didn't seem cool, it didn't seem postmodern, it just seemed like a very old-fashioned word. What is there to say about night-time? Of course, it's an intersectional term, a global term. It's something we all experience in different ways, and it has a long lineage. It's a historical way of analysing life, and analysing cities and experiences. And people write about it in all sorts of ways—often, again, with tension, a schizophrenic tension between fear and dread, and horror. But, for me, I also had a sense that it could be funny. You could have adventures there. You could see all sorts of crazy stuff going on. It's a place of spectacles and sensations. Why would you be up at two o'clock at night historically? Or even at eleven o'clock or three o'clock? You should be in bed: you're tired, you've been working during the day. The only reason you would be out is if you are a criminal, a prostitute, part of a small tranche of people doing night labour. Otherwise, you are looking for experiences; you are hungry for a form of existence that you cannot get in your daily world. So, it's very Jekyll and Hyde, very binary.

And I was doing this project while I was living in the East End

of London. A place around Brick Lane, which historically is a place of migration—Jewish, Irish, Nigerian, Bangladeshi—and mutating constantly. A place lots of people would never go to; they feel it's a place of horrors, the place of Jack the Ripper and all those kinds of stories. But by that time, in the early to mid-2000s, it had become the kind of city the government and the Mayor of London were excited about. The nightlife there had been discovered. Night-time: creative industries, people that go to parties, obscure DJs, people wearing eccentric clothes, people drinking. Hopefully like all of you! It was not excessive or peripheral to the economy, but very important. And reading all this literature about it, it seemed to me, as someone who mostly worked on migration and colonialism, night-time was being described in the way that the imperial world was described in the 18th and 19th centuries: a place formerly kind of weird or obscure or barren, but that now could be surveyed, utilised, numbered, extracted, profited from.

I was caught up in this double-bind. Thinking—here I am, wandering around, trying to make sense of it. Thinking—how do you describe night-time? *What* is the night-time? And thinking—well, what's the value of *my* work? Am I making the city, its dynamics, its infrastructure, its architecture, its usages useful to people that I don't necessarily think of as my friends? I have not resolved that tension. In my mind, I don't want to ever know any city, I always want to remain confused and ignorant about it. And I never want to know night-time completely: I want to get closer to it, but it always has to escape me, to elude me.

As I was saying, the subcultural economy was being trumpeted by Tony Blair's New Labour government. Night-time was a way of rebranding London for a younger crowd, a hipper crowd, for an international tourist crowd, the type of people that go to Berlin for the weekend to go to techno clubs, or to a particular restaurant in Milan. I
wanted to do something about work because for me living in a supposedly funky area in East London, I was having a great time, I didn't do much work, so I was very much part of the kind of gentrified crowd. I could get away with it because I wasn't white, so people thought I wasn't a 'gentrifier', but I was. And around me all the time I realised there was a shadow to my happiness, and it was the people who enable all the things I took for granted. It was the long tail, the long shadow, the deep wiring of the night economy. I lived in a building that, every night, roughly at about midnight, homeless people would break into, because somehow, they had found keys or created keys to maybe about 200 buildings in the area. So, they would get their keys, go in, and there were about three very big garbage bins, which they used to sleep inside, and then they would disappear again at five o'clock in the morning. And they were separated from where I slept, on the ground floor, by a wall. I like to think of myself as alert, I like to think of myself as socially conscious, but it took me years to find this out. Right next to me, a couple of yards, were these people with a different map of the city, tactics, improvisational skills, desperation, which meant they were sleeping in garbage bins right next to me. And that made me feel stupid—and that I had to do more work to begin to understand the night.

I did this through focusing on labour. I wanted to understand different kinds of labour. I went on police helicopters that surveyed the streets, I went with people that pray all night, I went to people who get rid of ghosts or try to get rid of ghosts, people who sell their bodies, people who sell sex, people who shoot foxes, people who work down the river, night cleaners. I didn't do the kind of work or some of the type of work that you're doing, which is about interior space. My project was also pre-broadband. I still remember the sound of that time: there was dial-up, ping ping ping, you're trying to connect. The speed with which you could get information,

52 data, deal with clients, deal with friends, play

computer games together around the world—or have poor Filipino kids play themselves to death so you could get to another level of your computer game. All that super-fast stuff wasn't quite there—even YouTube had a limit of ten minutes per item.

But I was writing during the night very often. I was getting back from my explorations, interviews, and adventures, and typing away. And sometimes, I would also pay bills and email various people. I knew many other people were also awake, so I think I was living through the period where what seemed exterior, physically in terms of labour, in terms of work, in terms of your psychology, exhaustion, exploitation, was becoming increasingly domesticated. There's not much of a gulf between there and here, whoever the night is out there and you in here: we were all in it together in a complicated way. And that pressure has accelerated incredibly over the years. I only got a 'smart' phone about a year and a half ago. It seems very late, I remember thinking: why do people have mobile phones, what do they need them for? Now I sleep with my mobile phone under my pillow. I think it's stealing my dreams. I believe it's sending frequencies into my head which are evil. And when I wake up every two hours, I immediately go look at my emails to tell me about all the work I haven't done, and then I go and find out that whatever sports team that I'm interested in has lost. I wake up and, almost every morning this year, someone that I like, a musician, a filmmaker, an artist, has died. So I wake up to reach under the pillow, and my morning begins for me with death, and then I stay in bed, sometimes just crying or just howling. Then, of course, I start writing to all my friends, putting up on social media, "He's dead, she's dead!", and what's going to become of us, this is terrible. So I've become a media operator. I've become part of this sort of transnational wiring. And this information that, even ten years ago, let alone twenty, thirty years ago, I wouldn't have known

about for days, maybe for weeks, possibly for months, I know now; it's there in my space, it interacts, it is choreographed with my bedroom, my building, the rhythms of the day. And then I go to the shower! I don't know what kind of phase of life this is—of capitalism, of urbanism, of technology. Jodi Dean calls it communitive capitalism. All I know is that I'm making, along with all of us, a lot of money for a lot of people who are not my friends. So, if this is a deal, if this is a financial interaction, it feels overloaded. What am I getting out of it? I mostly feel more depressed than I ever felt before. I feel very sluggish.

I live in a building with students, in the building where Def Jam records, founded by Rick Rubin and bringing out records by LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, was founded. I'm often up late, and the corridor which I live in is filled with students: they are there at three o'clock in the morning, in pyjamas with their earphones on, because they hate the people they are sharing their tiny rooms with. They are doing assignments for class, and they will have to be in class at nine o'clock or even eight o'clock in the morning. This is, for me, not an education. For me, this is not any kind of life. This is not any kind of night. They are doing this at the age of eighteen, nineteen—training and abusing themselves to become the sort of people that they feel the economy requires. Because they are also trying to do internships, trying to get a foot into whatever professions they feel they must. So I look around, and this came through to me in different aspects, both in the slides and in your film, Martin, that night isn't just a place, it's not only time; it's about a collective agreement or collective collusion about what kind of world we want to live in.

I think some of you have been reading people like Jonathan Crary and his writing about 24/7: *Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep*³. To an extent, what has been described as a pandemic in mental health issues in the United

53 States—well, one of the things that is creating

this kind of group psychology—is technology and its impact upon the night. The disappearance of the night, the malformation of the night. And so, that old category—day versus night—no longer works. You wake up (if you wake up), and you're sort of a zombie—you're not really alert, not really there, then you spend most of your time on your phone dealing with people all around the place. Where are they? Where are you? We barely know how to describe all this stuff. Yet what to do about it? Is it legislation?

There are companies in France—for instance, Volkswagen has tried to make it okay for employees not to have to deal with email after 5 pm or not to have an obligation to interact with employers during the weekend. Is that a solution? I don't know. In a sense, collectively, where we are now economically, in time and history, we are a laboratory for the transformation of existence in the Global North—and maybe everywhere. And so, Karl Marx's ideas or his speculations seem really resonant. What he regarded as incredibly extreme, the terrible lives of this subordinated group, a barely-living proletariat: it seems not a million miles away from what a lot of us live. We are all, if you buy that argument, we are all the proletariat, and we are all being abused, and we are all being exploited by the vampiric greed of capital, and it's almost a self-fulfilling need to get ever more avaricious. So that's kind of a cheerful challenge that faced me!

In terms of methodology, I spent a lot of time thinking about sound, what kinds of sounds you hear at night. People living in smaller and smaller apartments, on other people's sofas, being terrorised by refrigerator noise or by a drop drop drop drop or by central heating. There are people, serious scientists, who feel that still to be computed is the psychological damage being done by these banal microscopic sounds that more of us are being exposed to. It's a kind of dark ambient. I was very aware of something that is becoming a more prominent topic:
sonic nature. For instance, birds you would expect to hear at five o'clock in the morning. Suddenly you listen to them at three o'clock because the areas where they sleep or settle are being changed due to the development of new parking or transport arrangements. On the one hand, everybody wants to have quiet at night, but too quiet and thickly-glazed windows are also problems; you can't hear what's going on outside, you feel imprisoned from the sonic world, the auditory citizenship of the city at night. And I also spent a lot of time thinking about smell. I remember jumping up and down on dead rabbits so we could take the guts of the rabbit out to feed to foxes.

I remember spending time in corner shops and taxis. The two scariest places that I spent time in were not exciting places; they were a taxi and a corner shop. The shop was a bit like this building. It had a basement where people were gambling, studying, communicating with families in different countries. It had lots of cameras linked to the shop above. It was a place literally on the street corner. You would have local gangs, of twelve- or thirteen-year-olds, routinely going in at two o'clock almost like an invading army, and saying, "Give me that, give me that", and then taking out knives and stabbing, shouting. We could see downstairs that our co-workers, our friends, our relatives were being attacked. And sometimes the guys would go up to help, but sometimes too they knew that there weren't enough of them. And even though they would press the panic button or call the police, the police would always arrive too late. The corner shop was multi-camera'd and surveyed, but the cameras weren't protecting them. It was a horrible place.

With taxi drivers there was a division between black cabs, which had partitions, and private cabs, which didn't. Passengers would say, I don't have money, I'm not going to pay, what are you going to do about it. And often they'd

show me their backs or their necks, and they looked like a war-map of scars and scabs. So there you had night experience at a very microscopic level, coming up as a sort of muscle memory.

**Josephine Devaud** Speaking of taxi drivers, it makes me think of Martin's project, *Night Shifts*, and I was wondering if, Martin, you want to comment, either on the work or on what was being referenced here?

**Martin Kohout** I think there is a lot to take in. But one of the things I was thinking about from the very beginning, during the introduction, someone said, we think about these big cities, one of them being London, like cities that live non-stop, around the clock, 24/7. But what I find interesting in London, which is a reminder of how romantic this idea is, if you walk outside in London at midnight, you don't really see that much light, you don't really see places open, you don't really see people moving around. You see it in Berlin, but it's the people going there for entertainment. I think there is this big difference between the daytime and the night-time, in the sense that, during the time I was working on my project in London, every eighth Londoner was working a night shift. When you are moving through the daytime, you think you have a visual idea of people at work. You see them all around you. But if you work at night, most of this work is concealed from sight, hidden from street level, or it's not even in the city, what would be considered the city, it's outside, it's continually moving, transportation and so on.

When I started this project, I wanted to make a documentary film, not the fiction film you saw just now, and the reason why I didn't do a documentary film, in the end, had nothing to do with the night. It had to do with managers and realising they wouldn't be very enthusiastic, and I would not be allowed to go shoot in specific locations. Still, one of the interesting things I realised was how I was expected to see this labour, how I was expecting to see this labour, by just going out for a

stroll. Which is what I liked about your book because you would go to those people directly, which I did at the end as well by doing interviews, but I was not with them at their workplace, I was inviting them to talk to me. I feel like one of the most important things about people who work at night, or about the idea of night, is the loneliness and isolation that you understand is a big part of it. Because even if you are in a workplace where you are not working alone—as many of the jobs take place in huge spaces doing whatever task on your own—you are still working under such conditions that you don't have much interaction with your colleagues. It's very isolating. And when you come home, you try to sleep during the daytime, when it's hot, loud, bright. You are completely sleep-deprived all the time, and when you have an overlapping window, most of your family and friends are at work, so again you are isolated. And for me, this is one of the enormous differences that I think people who don't have the experience of working at night don't understand. So when we lead people like us into the night as a space, we often think about it more like a boundless space, where the rules are blurred. Loneliness is really connected with being social but working at night is almost the opposite in most cases.

Considering the qualities we've been talking about concerning the night, I feel like, when you are working the night shift, they are connected to exhaustion. You shift into a different state, especially after a few night shifts, where people are just functioning semi-automatically but can't enjoy or analyse much and so on. It becomes blurred, endless nights, because during the daytime you can see the shadows and you can see the sun shifting. During the night all these things are pretty much the same. This is one of the things I was interested in for a long time because it's a universal organic quality of humans and other creatures that is very much in contrast with what we expect of

very much the same productivity, and so on; their productivity is kind of flat. Yet organic organisms have cyclical or metabolic rhythms, they have peaks, and they have lows, and that's continually alternating back and forth. A lot of the work being done at night nowadays, especially with the information and economic shift affecting all of this, has become some sort of push to align people with the productive economic pace. The exhausting work to be as productive as possible, which is precisely what Jonathan Crary mentions in his book. But I wanted to kind of prove that the moment when we hit the wall, the limit—and it's obvious it's going this way, it's impossible not to—it's what also makes us human. But just changing around your sleeping pattern is not going to solve your sleep deprivation or insomnia.

**Sukhdev Sandhu** While you were doing your work, you were probably reading a lot of the increasing Silicon Valley literature on sleep. Sleep is big business. It's big money these days. You have the Arianna Huffingtons investing in this. There's increasingly the idea that if you get the right software, if you get the right app, if you pay 500 euros for the right kind of blanket, then many of your problems can be solved. And it's not the answer! If it's even true at the individual level! This is a silly kind of privatisation. It's inadequate from a broader, structural analysis. Finally, people are beginning to understand sleeplessness as an essential way of understanding society, but the Silicon Valley types are not actually going to the root of the problem; they are just trying to deal with it in a very silly, over-economised way.

**Martin Kohout** This also reminds me, it's not in the book, but one of the things that the curators of this exhibition and I were discussing was this interview with the CEO of Netflix. They asked him, so, what's your next step to grow, who is the competitor you have to beat, is it Amazon Prime or these other services that pretty much offer a similar product? And the guy said, no, it's sleep. The
thing we must fight against now is
how many hours can we have the
viewer's eyeballs with us. Of course,
the limit is the amount of time people
spend on necessary things that are
taking them away from the screen.
Not the other companies producing
similar content.

Sukhdev Sandhu Yeah, if I watched a programme five years ago and I liked it, I'd have to wait. I'd have to wait a week for the next episode. And now increasingly I watch more and more, all in one go, until 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock into the night. But I also want to argue kind of against you, and against myself, about the mobile phone: it makes a difference if we think about the archive of the night. At first, in my project, I thought I was talking to people, and I thought maybe I was giving people a voice through my research, and maybe shining a spotlight. But increasingly that seemed kind of patronising to me because they were recording their lives, they were filming, in conversations with people in different countries, they were hacking systems, playing music. And oftentimes, I don't know if any of you saw that exhibition a couple of years ago, of photographs taken from inside refugee camps, of people who managed to get to Europe from North Africa or the Middle East. The public images spread about were those of people nearly drowning or drowning, people looking terrible, but an artist-photographer had managed to hack into the images that some of those people living in charity camps had produced of their lives. So instead of looking at pictures of the camps and of the beach, we were looking inside. And what we were seeing was people masturbating, people talking, singing songs to their families, or making funny jokes and you had a sort of different dimension. Something that looked uniformly awful and terrible from the outside but was a bit more complex, a tribute to people's improvisation and ability to deal with complex

writing, or making, or thinking about
night-time, there is the challenge.
It's understandable if we foreground
darkness, difficulty, desperation,
but that's not the whole story. And
some people love working at night
time because they feel that they are
freer, it's in their own space, they
do feel a bit less inhibited, and it all
comes to show how people are not
just victims of their situations, and
of their jobs, and their livelihoods.

Martin Kohout I agree, but from the interviews that I did—I did about ten on camera, and I decided I would edit about four of them, I wanted to have the whole spectrum, I wanted to have people who talked about it positively—but what I find funny is that those people who talk about it positively in the video, and they weren't the only ones, they really like working the night shift because they don't like to be around too many people. So basically, they like it because no one is bothering them. From the research that I read, and people I talked to, you often have young people working at night, because physiologically and metabolically, they are better able to deal with these conditions. And often it's their side job, and they can use this time to study, or they like to have quiet time, depending on what the situation is. Some of the positions allow you to just sit somewhere and keep an eye on the place, that it is safe. In the first interview in the documentary, he's very young, and he thinks it's great, amazing, but his portrayal of it, and I like him a lot, is self-deceptive. There is this moment where he is talking about, “When I come to work I read all these messages on WhatsApp groups I'm part of, hundreds of messages people wrote during the night-time, then I read them and see what they are talking about, and that's my life”. And you're like, wait a second, how can this be your life, when you are not participating in it, you are reading about the life of other people.

In a way, most of the
people interviewed started on the
night shift thinking it would last for
a few months. Then they realised

they had been there for a few years
because most of the time these
jobs are better paid, and they had
some personal reasons for taking
it, but very few of them were really
very into it. Recently I was listening
to an NPR podcast, I think it's the
last episode of *This American Life*,
about one specific café, and the
journalist spends 24 hours there
interviewing people who come
in. There is one waitress who has
been working there for nearly 20
years, doing the night shift, and she
loves it. She says, “You know this
place at night is a community, it’s a
specific atmosphere, it’s a different
kind of interaction you get here. And
this is my family, why would I want
to change my job if I love what’s
happening here at this particular
time of the day, these particular
people who repeatedly come here,
or the people that come once after
partying”. And, I was like, ok, she
really does love her job, it makes
sense. But a lot of the time, I think
the problem is that—or of course,
when I play devil’s advocate—most
of the people who work night shifts
are not aware of the medical issues
they will face later in life. The same
goes for most of us here, we don’t
really know how bad it is if you sleep
less than eight hours a day, which
even though I know I don’t sleep
eight hours a day, it’s really bad,
there are a lot of research papers
out there about it. These things
are somehow not spoken about,
especially when you start working
a night shift job. I’m sure some
people work in finance jobs during
the night-time, and they know all of
this. The managers will very rarely
provide people with extra health
care benefits, they will not really tell
them that they should probably be
taking some vitamins and all these
things. In the film, the characters
are wearing these orange glasses
when they want to fall asleep or
blue lenses when they need to stay
awake, which is a proven condition
among night workers. Most people
don’t know it, and most people
only start realising that something
is going wrong when they already

maybe if you ask someone who
has been working the night shift
for three months, they will say it's
great. Because they are really well
paid, it's quiet, and so on, but they
just don't understand that their
chances of getting diabetes have
already risen in the first two weeks
of doing the job, so massively that if
you told them, they would probably
not take that job. I know what you
mean, but it's not so black and white.
I spoke with people working at Tesco,
where they said the managers are
trying to cut costs, so basically,
they have so little light in the space
where they have to restock that they
cannot read the labels and don't
really know where to put stuff. And
then you realise that there is no
way you would be happy working in
these kinds of conditions, you just
understand that you are not really
taken care of, it's not a place to enjoy,
you know.

Sukhdev Sandhu When I was younger, I hated the night and I wanted to work in a world that was basically 24/7. I hated my parents' world because they went to work at 7 or 8 in the morning and they would come back at 5 pm. I felt if you were a creative person who liked art or architecture and all these things, wouldn't it be wonderful if there was no difference between night and day, and you were always 'on' because you're so creative and you're with creative people. I don't know if people feel like that—or if the ways we have been describing how we experience the night or think about the relationship between work and feeling—and living—is that recognisable? Or are we just aliens?

Martin Kohout I guess, also, something I mentioned before, you don't, most people don't see it, you said it as well earlier, we take for granted the fruits of night shift labour. I mean people understand, in the morning when you walk down the street and it's clean, you know someone cleaned it, but you don't really give too much thought about when they cleaned it, what kind of lifestyle they have to be able to do this, and so on and so on. One of the reasons I wanted to do a
project focused on the night shift, which was the series of two-three films, is because I felt it was, to an extent, invisible to the rest of the population. If you realised that one out of every eight people is working the night-time, you might go down the street in London, and you can feel it, you just had no idea. And like in your book, it's quite nice because there are all these stories, this is everywhere, and it's invisible. And that kind of realisation that there is this city at night around you, but it's on the other side of where you are living, also felt very interesting to me. This kind of, when I'm awake there is this other city that is asleep, and when I go to sleep, this city wakes up, it's kind of what we know from vampire movies and so on.

**Sukhdev Sandhu** One of the reactions I had to my book was several women saying this is what being a mother is like. We are sleep disrupted constantly, we are exhausted, we have jobs and have to work outside the house. And nobody thinks this is a big deal, because this is maternity, or this is what being a caregiver is about. But if we go back to a sort of semi-forgotten element of radical seventies politics, which is wages for homework, wages and support for mothers and housewives, then we would look at this issue very differently. Caregivers, mothers, to a lesser extent perhaps fathers, have had to deal with fractured circadian rhythms and the long-term implications of that throughout history.

**Javier F. Contreras** We realise there is a disruption in the way we use daytime and night-time, which is gradual, and we are going more and more in that direction. From the outside it seems like it's mostly associated with individuals, with adults. My question is: do you think the people who are preserving a circadian rhythm in Western societies, in urban societies, are the kids? Because these are the people who are still living according to a circadian rhythm. If there were no kids, do you think the distinction between day and night would still exist?

**Sukhdev Sandhu** I think that's a brilliant question. I haven't read enough studies about night-time on children, but I know many people take sleep most seriously when it comes to children. Because they're part of themselves. Of course, you fight really hard to protect the child: you have an idea of what is normal, what is ethical, what is a proper investment in the development of that child. You protect that child with your life. So, yeah, the child is maybe the last category of people for whom sleep is taken seriously. And it gets increasingly worrying as more and more teenagers and early teenagers these days go to schools where there is more compulsory testing. And nice bourgeois parents worry about that and give them extra classes and say work a bit harder, do more homework. They are probably losing sleep as well because of their parents' anxiety about the future. So I don't think even they are exempt.

**Martin Kohout** Yes, to me it brings to mind a few things, one is that traditionally schools would often start at 7:30 in the morning. And for some years, since these questions were brought into a broader discussion, people have started coming out with studies about metabolism. Teenagers are just not able to be that sharp at that hour of the day. For physiological reasons they should start going to school at nine o'clock if you want them to learn stuff and do well in tests and so on. So again, it's hard, we are looking at our future potential. Because the kids are about to grow into something, so we want to shape them in the right way, we care about their patterns, but as a parent, maybe I have to take an extra job so my kid can go to university, so I will not sleep. The first person I interviewed, who is not in the documentary, was this guy who, halfway through the interview, I thought, I should not do this project because I will never be able to communicate this experience. He told me, well, during the daytime I am a manager in a company, I have a white-collar job. When I finish at five o'clock I go home and eat dinner and

go to sleep for an hour, wake up, take a shower, and go clean virgin trains through the night. And I was like, this is crazy. He's been doing it for three years because he needed to pay a debt and take care of his child.

Yes, I feel that in that sense most people's habits change when they have a child, people often become, if they can afford it, more health-oriented or more health aware. But then I was also thinking about how the problem with the night shift is often compared with jet lag, and people are saying, if we can deal with jet lag, then why can't we find a solution to deal with the night shift. The problem is that when you are flying somewhere for a holiday, or you travel for work, you come to an environment that is shifted a given number of hours from where you came from, but everything in that environment is following the same rhythm, so you just join that. Our bodies can adapt one hour per day, so if you go somewhere with a five-hour difference, after five days or a week, you will be fine, you will have adapted, everyone around you is following the same rhythm. And then you have the night shift job, maybe you work four days on, two days off, four days on, two days off, so for the four days everybody is in opposite rhythms, then you have two days free, and you have the choice to try to push yourself, stay awake longer, align to the other rhythm, or keep your own rhythm. But who will do that. You have two days off, you don't want to sleep throughout the day and be awake at night when your family is sleeping. Nothing is happening outside, you have nothing to do, and if you were like, well, this is the best thing I can do for my body, then people would have fewer health issues. People would have fewer physiological problems with working nights, but they would have way more mental, psychological, and social deficits. If you look at places that have totally dark winters, very far north, and so on, they don't really have a circadian rhythm in a classical way. Because there might be no sunshine for

some time, but everyone is following this same

rhythm, everyone keeps waking up, and the job starts at the same time, so it's almost like a social agreement in that sense. And then there's the question you are posing, which I think is very beautiful too: on what do we base the rhythm that we have agreed on. And that's maybe something that is crumbling a bit. Because possibly there will be a time when schools will offer different schedules for different parents in various circumstances, I don't know. And maybe education will shift more into homes and be computerised. Suddenly there won't be such a need to stick to the same schedule for everyone involved.

So, the film you saw first, you can't see it anywhere on the internet yet, it will be online at some point. But this film called *Working Nights* you can always find it on YouTube and watch it for yourself. I think the first ten minutes describe well from experience what we are trying to speak of as observers. And I also have to say I'm very impressed with your exhibition, it's great, I think you did an amazing job. Congratulations to you. It's an honour to be a part of it, and I would love to be here for the other four nights, which is not possible, but I will be thinking about it.

**Josephine Devaud** Thank you for the very nice anecdotes and stories, and your argument about the Marxist way in which we use our energy at night. My question is, is there an open war against sleep time? I see many documentaries on YouTube of people trying to teach you how to stop sleeping. I learned that Albert Einstein slept like 11 hours a day, and with this, he could think very deeply, but Napoleon slept only four hours, and he was very efficient. I was wondering if there is a connection with the economy trying to steal our sleep and make us more productive.

**Sukhdev Sandhu** I think there are at least two things going on. There is a line of thinking that says sleeping and proper sleeping is for the true aristocracy of our period. So proper sleeping is only for the rich, and
people who can organise their lives, or who have the power. But then, you get people like Margaret Thatcher and now Donald Trump, who makes a significant point of saying, “I’m not like those other loser leaders; I only sleep four hours a day, and even then I’m mostly watching Fox News”. And there is a gender aspect to this, it’s unmanly, you’re not tough, you’re not really even meant to be thinking about sleep because if you’re a real alpha man or alpha person or a real leader, then you just conquer the night and you conquer sleep.

Martin Kohout At the same time—I can send the research paper to someone from the team—a friend of mine who is a neuroscientist did this research into how to extract labour from us while we are asleep. Of course, there is also the tendency to figure that, maybe when the body is asleep, we can do something with it. We can do very simple decision making and fulfil straightforward decision-making tasks even though we are unconscious, asleep. So this friend of mine said to me, maybe once people figure out that you cannot do less than four hours a night, then at least for the four hours you know you are plugged into this, and when you wake up you have generated information or energy or whatever it is. So, in these videos, what they are describing and what we have been discussing, it's a very Silicon Valley kind of idea. It's like, when do you have fun. When is your life about something else? Which is kind of this Bifo Berardi idea, if to be wealthy means to have time, not necessarily money, if you're super rich, but you are only doing your job, maybe you're happy, but for me, that's not what I would think of as great quality of life.

Sukhdev Sandhu I imagine this is a grey area for anyone who wants to become a billionaire or a trillionaire. When I'm asleep, basically, you power me. So, when I'm in bed and asleep, you can go jack me up to one hundred percent and maximise me, so I'm ready to go whenever I wake up. Basically, to blur the boundary between

the human and the non-human, the human and technology. I would imagine many people are already looking into doing this.

1. Karl Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy* (1867, and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), vol.1, p.342

2. Karl Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy* (1867, and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), vol.1, p.375

3. Jonathan Crary, *Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep* (London: Verso, 2013)

Martin Kohout is an artist based in Berlin. He is the winner of the 2017 Jindřich Chalupecký Award and a driving force on the international contemporary art scene. His work focuses on the various aspects of technology and the place of man at the heart of current societal conflicts linked to individualism, communication and globalisation. In 2018 the *Daylight Management* exhibition, the first event of the *Night Shifts* project, took place in the Auto Italia space in London, led by a community of artists, researchers, scientists and night workers. With his *Slides* project, Kohout explores the consequences of night work on health and human relations in relation to current technologies.

Sukhdev Sandhu is Director of the Centre for Experimental Humanities at New York University (NYU), Associate Professor of English and Social and Cultural Analysis and author of the books *London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, I'll Get My Coat and Night Haunts: A Journey through the London Night*. An award-winning author and former chief critic for *The Daily Telegraph*, he writes for publications such as *Sight & Sound*, the *London Review of Books*, magazines such as *The Wire* and *Frieze*, and *The Guardian*.

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F I L M
Think about the cinema and other leisure activities such as concerts or theatre, originally constructed as evening events and spaces. They create the fiction that the body never stops. In a contemporary note, Netflix has declared that its biggest competitor is sleep.

What makes the cinema an extraordinary place is its ability to isolate itself from day or night, to have no temporality. The cinema is like a box, a mise en abyme, a world within a world. Cinema is also a moment in time, more or less short, that transports us through images and takes us on a journey. Thanks to retinal persistence, the prism of artificial light, as well as ambient darkness, cinema captivates spectators in a distinct cinematic space-time.

Students here invoked two ways of thinking about the cinema at night. On the one hand, they sought to summon the almost vanished collective memory of an archetypal and nostalgic form of cinema as a semi-fictional structure. On the other hand, they sought to construct a cinema decor as a semi-Fellinian, semi-transportable structure via three emblematic sets: the ticket office, the popcorn bar and the theatre itself, all in real size, to host a memorable evening.

After the screening of the film *L'Époque* by director Matthieu Bareyre, who filmed the night-time goings-on of the Place de la République in Paris for more than a year, architect Youri Kravtchenko discussed with him the social space that the night constructs in the three boxes deployed for the occasion. According to the director, night is a space-time that tends to compel people to say things to each other that they would not say during the day. This space-time, according to the architect, is what links the night to the cinematic space, to cinema screenings, and finally to architecture.

Students: Shana Bennett, Elisa Cuddré-Mauroux, Nemo Reitz, Nora Rhyner

HEAD - Genève Interior Architecture Department

Photos: © Audrey Besancenay, Baptiste Coulon

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
MATTHIEU BAREYRE AND
YOURI KRAVTCHENKO
f'ar Lausanne, 12.05.2019

Youri Kravtchenko It's tempting to ask you a lot of questions. But I will just ask you about how the film *L'Époque* originated, for those who don't know. It's a movie you started four years ago, right? It's primarily shot at night.

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Matthieu Bareyre Yes, I
had the idea for the film

in January 2015 at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. At that time, I had the idea for the title, the project itself, and other elements like the music. And I started shooting it in May 2015. I finished shooting in June 2017. The editing of the last version—because, in fact, there are two versions, a royalty-free festival version and the commercial version, it's two completely different edits, two completely different lengths—the editing of the commercial version was completed
in February. And the film was released in April in France. So, it has indeed been four years.

**Youri Kravtchenko** In the end, does it get tiring working at night?

**Matthieu Bareyre** Yes, yes, the state in which I've been is a state of exhaustion... With all that comes with it, a sense of irritability, of tetchiness. Yeah, I think it made me highly sensitive to a lot of things, both the good and the bad. Because inevitably, and you will see, the film is made in rather tricky situations. The street, nightclubs, wild demonstrations, it can get pretty violent. So, it's true that it exacerbates the feelings you may experience. Well, it needed to come out at that moment of my life, I think it corresponded well to the story of what I was doing at that age of life, and which is my own youth. Yes, it was also full of downsides, well, I'm a migraine sufferer, so it was hell. Actually, migraine sufferers are not allowed to sleep late. They do not have the right to have late, lazy mornings because it causes migraines. So needless to say, there I was.

**Youri Kravtchenko** Oh, that was not... too much suffering?

**Matthieu Bareyre** Yeah, but at the same time, there was something more significant. There's not just suffering, of course, there's also, I was going to say enjoyment, but how to say, it's actually a kind of exaltation. Permanent exaltation. Of course, it is the feeling I have when I remember those moments, whether it is filming or editing, it is a kind of a permanent alternation between exhaustion and the joy of overcoming it, of succeeding in overcoming the exhaustion. Voila!

**Youri Kravtchenko** We'll save the questions for after the screening. *L'Époque* ("*Our Times*" in English), I find it a very fitting title, concise, it really represents a specific unit of time and place, as we were talking about earlier. It's happening there,

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Place de la République, you'll see for yourself.

So, this allows me to come back to the first film. It's the film by Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta, local filmmakers who shot their first film at a very young age, in 1956. They shot it in London. They had applied for a scholarship from the British Institute, and they received 204 pounds to shoot a film about the night, which takes place in another public square, Piccadilly Circus. They shot it on twenty-eight Saturdays to keep within the Saturday night life theme. Twenty-eight moments, you'll see, almost without words. First, they shot the documentary, and then they created a whole musical work to accompany it, something like a mash-up where they took music from other commercials and other films. It's a very beautiful and captivating film, which could also have been called "*Our Times*", except that it would have been referencing other times. So, I'll let you watch this movie. It's eighteen very poetic minutes, and then we will move on to Matthieu's film. That's it, thank you.

**Youri Kravtchenko** So, I hope you enjoyed it. Matthieu, I think this is not the first time you get this question, I know that you get it a lot. Rose, in the film, is an incredibly endearing character. Who is she, and what happened to her?

**Matthieu Bareyre** She is becoming who she is. And we are starting to work together on a fiction film inspired by her life.

**Youri Kravtchenko** A fiction film, okay. Matthieu, do you feel like you filmed a French night? Do you think it could be the context of the film? That's what it feels like. I am also aware that we find ourselves in the context of Lausanne. And I asked myself this question during the film: Is it a film that could have been shot in a Swiss context? Obviously, you have just arrived here, and the question arises because we have a specific moment in a particular story. My question is, are you filming Parisian nights?

**Matthieu Bareyre** During the film, I ran into a gentleman who left before the

end of the screening, who told me that what I showed was extreme, and subsequently we talked about it with some students from the school. And there was a Parisian living in Geneva, who had lived through some of those moments, those years, 2015, 2016, 2017. She said that, yes, it had been hyper exacerbated, and since she has lived in Geneva, she thinks it's a lot calmer.

Finally, I am not aware of it because I am not someone who likes to travel a lot. I want to film what's around me. What I think I know about. I try to look around where I am.

I guess, well, I don't know to what extent it's clear when I show the film in Cairo, or wherever. People do not necessarily tell me, that's really France. They are somewhat surprised that this is France. They are surprised by two things: that Paris looks like that, it's not at all like the postcards we have in mind, and then they are surprised to recognise themselves in the movie's protagonists and what they are expressing.

**Youri Kravtchenko** I have other questions, but the public may have some too? It would be interesting to have their views.

**Audience** Yes, it's a pretty technical question. Thank you for the film, it's a very good film, I really enjoyed it. But I have a question that I asked myself during the whole movie. We saw some speakers give their names, so we see them at the end. What was the process, were they all asked, "Do you agree to appear in the movie?" And an ancillary question: Was there anyone who came back once the film was aired saying "Ah it's not going at all how I thought it would, and I don't want to be shown like this"?

**Matthieu Bareyre** It's funny because this concern with the editing, or the right to show, is really something from our times. The movie we were watching just before, *Night-time*, right? When we watched that film, I said to myself, it's incredible that this movie

was made at that moment in history, the fifties.

I think everything was filmed without the awareness of the people in it. Yeah, they were shooting on the streets, and image rights did not exist yet. What is staggering today is the awareness that people have of it because they are so afraid that they will be betrayed, that one will destroy, mistreat their image. They are very cautious about that.

This is noticeable after the screenings because I am asked the question before, i.e. at the time of filming. I mean there were people I was not filming, who were not at all in my frame, who came to me and said, "Hey don't shoot me, you don't have the right", whereas I had not planned to film them. In any case, this is very acute today because people, as soon as they see cameras, they think that it is the television, that it is there to steal something from them. Well, I don't believe that's the way I work. In fact, the people in the film, the characters, I met at random, on the street, at demonstrations, in clubs. Like here, I met Nicolas, who introduced me to Solène, who introduced me to so on, and that's how it went. I had a challenge, which was to make a film that was not just my take on whatever, not an auteur film, the gaze of someone on something. What I was interested in was that it would be a film about the people I met, not just those who are in the film but also those I met and filmed without thinking of putting them in the final edit.

Often what happened was that, after a shoot, after meeting a particular person or sometimes after several months, I asked them, I explained to them what I really wanted, that I wanted to film them and maybe wanted to keep them in the final edit. It seemed essential to say to them, "If I want to be able to keep you in editing, sign something".

So, the question is, when do we talk about it? Since I never spoke about it at first because it breaks the relationship when we start off talking about contracts or
no contracts. Well, I often talked about it at the end of the evening, or at the end of the time I spent with them. But what is important is that it's not a question of taking, because at that moment people, well, how to say, we are together. It's not that hard to film people once you get their trust because you meet them, and something is happening between you. What is harder is after, because when it's the evening, we are in a particular state, we are entirely in it. The question is: Will you be able to live with this image one month, two months, two years later? So, not very often, but it has happened, I sent them the rushes, but it depended on what stage of production I was at.

But of course as soon as I felt that there were people who interested me, I took pictures. They had already signed an authorisation either at the end of the evening or at some point. Either I wrote to them, or I sent them rushes. I sent them screenshots. And then, when I was editing, I sent them their segment. Sometimes, I even sent them the film because it was vital for me that they could come along to the screenings to appropriate, to claim this film: "Yes, maybe I've changed, but at that moment, it seems to be in line with the idea that I had of life or myself".

**Youri Kravtchenko** Was the idea of filming the night there from the beginning?

**Matthieu Bareyre** Yes, yes, very quickly, as we said at the beginning. I initially thought of a short film called *Nocturne*, which also took place at night. Finally nothing to do with that, it is about a group of young people that I followed for two years, who are sort of addicted to games, horse racing in the Hippodrome De Vincennes. I was not at all an insomniac or night owl.

I never really liked the night. I never inhabited the night. I've never been one to walk around at night. I think I'm interested in freedom, and the night is the moment we feel the freest. There is a liberation of

bodies, where language and things become possible, where we escape a little from who we are during the day, where we come from, where we are supposed to go, what we are supposed to be because we have a function, a status, or whatever.

What interests me is when you venture into areas of life that, in fact, you don't know, and that you didn't voluntarily choose to avoid. Well, it's things like that.

So, a kind of territory of the involuntary, the uncontrolled, the unconscious. These are the things that interest me. From dreams to nightmares.

What I mean is that there are moments when things escape us. Nightmares and dreams are precisely that, that which is part of us. It scares us, fascinates us, attracts us irresistibly, and at the same time, we cannot really claim it because it brings out things that go against what we believe about ourselves, conventions, morality, and what is expected of us. It makes it jump out. And when one is interested in everything, I think that inevitably it will be during the night that it must happen. I remember during the shoot, well I worked a lot like that, by writing things that I found all over the place, phrases, tricks that guided me. And I found a sentence, it was a kind of novice verb, 'infinite eyes that the night opened in us'. And I thought, well, if the film is not called *L'Époque*, it could be called that, the infinite eyes or whatever. There was something there.

**Youri Kravtchenko** Your daily life during the filming process, we talked about it a little bit at the very beginning, just before screening the film. You lived this nocturnal experience for two years. Could you first explain to us how your weeks were punctuated more or less? And how did it affect your daily life?

**Matthieu Bareyre** I think there was, yes, indeed there was a kind of rhythm. To begin with, we often filmed on the weekend. We shot Thursday, Friday, Saturday, the times when we were most likely to meet people and especially when they were willing.

In fact, what I remember is that I spent a lot of time preparing for the shoots because of technical issues. It is true that it still requires a kind of, not asceticism, but, how to say, I think that the key is to make the technique not a type of instrument separate from us but something we're used to. That's why, even when I was not shooting, I had the camera in focus, I still had the camera. But also, I did not want to be, "He's the guy with the camera". Because in real life, things are clear. And then, I think the rest of the week, I tried to adjust again, I tried to find a balance that was broken again every weekend. Because we really had to film Soral, the DJ. We were well aware that it would end very late and it would make me miserable. I was finishing at 8 or 9 am. For me, it's really the end of the world. But for her, she continues until 2, 3, 4, 5 pm, as says M., the guy in the film who talks about drugs at one point.

For me, it was very violent, physically, and physiologically. It was like, yeah, as I said at the beginning, it felt like I was always exhausted and unwell because it was not at all natural for me.

Also, I spent a lot of time chatting with the people I had just met. There were people I met, and sometimes I saw them again during the week, and I had a coffee with them or talked with them. I found them on Facebook, I explained the film to them, etc., etc. Or I tried to understand where they would be going on the weekend. And especially with Thibault Dufay, the sound engineer, we were always wondering, "And where will *L'Époque* be going?", in fact. That is, what is important? Which one among the countless event options will it be?

Because, obviously, making a film like that, we are navigating in a sort of crossover with current events. The reality is that the news is an assemblage of information or events that we are sold and asked to consider as a priority. It has a lot of power, it's duplicated everywhere, it's imposed everywhere. So, it's hard to find our relationship

with that. To be able to find the distance while still being sensitised. Find enough distance to be able to make our choices. That was it, and it took a lot of time.

I remember I think I often spent the rest of the week talking with Thibault Dufet, the sound engineer, Sophia Colet, my co-author, and Marion Siéfert, artistic collaborator. We always talked about: What should we do? Where should we go? Who should we see, and how? How should we film? What is the right distance for a close-up? Things that may seem technical or something. In any case, in my view, they are fundamental when you make cinema. Effectively, what lens I would bring, because I was working with fixed-focus lenses. It's a bit crazy because I wanted this specific camera. And the problem is that with this camera, I did not have much range of brightness. I could not shoot too much in this range of sensitivity, going too high. As a result, I found myself having to work with fixed-focus lenses because it's night, and at night we need light when we don't have any. So, we opened the diaphragm completely, to 1.4, 1.8. As a result, I could not have a zoom because zooms don't open as much, they open to 2.8 max. And 2.8 is already too dark for me. So, I had four focal lengths with me while shooting, corresponding to the classic photo lengths. Basically, I had a 35, a 50, an 85, and sometimes a 120. I had them on me, but you need to have enough reflexes, an eye. For example, Mehdi, in the Place de la République, the young person who says, "If we notice, well, time is false, it is unreal. We are waiting for something, but what are we waiting for?". I don't know if you remember. He also speaks about his dream of feeling helpless. He was a guy who was very tall, very massive. He was a boxer, I remember, anyways, that was very impressive.

So, if I film it as I film, for example, I don't know, Arthur, on the docks, talking about his parents or his desires, business school, etc., I film him in a portrait style. It is the classic style, very harmonious,
very respectful of the dimensions of a face, etc. We will not feel his presence. So, at that moment, I must gauge the person I have in front of me. Here what I need is a wide-angle so we can feel him in the frame, to feel his weight.

And things like that take very long to acquire. I have not gone to film school myself, so it's also a kind of film school for me. It's four years, not four years but two years of intense, permanent filming where I shot all the time. And in fact, it's also a way of doing my CAP as they say.

**Youri Kravtchenko** Yes, Matthieu explained to me that—I don't know if you'll allow me to say it—but that he studied philosophy for a little while, four years?

**Matthieu Bareyre** I did not want you to say it, but voilà.

**Youri Kravtchenko** It's done, voilà, I will not say where. In any case, it's impressive. I don't know if you have any other questions.

**Audience** Good evening, thank you very much for the film, it was super interesting. There has been a lot of conversation around speech, and my question is, how did you decide who gets to speak? And for example, we often see the CRS, the police, and they don't have a voice, for example. There are characters who don't speak and who are present throughout the film. So, I wondered how this decision was made. How did the editing process work, and how did you limit how many people got to speak?

**Matthieu Barreyre** There are several questions in this question. So, regarding the police, I never went looking for someone at night because they had this or that function. The people I met, I don't even know what they were doing in life, and I didn't care. I would never have gone to a policeman to ask him whatever because he was a policeman. If I had met a policeman with his friends on a night out, I would have been interested. As

long as he would tell me about it spontaneously.

So already they cannot speak, they have the right not to speak. To go a little further, in fact the underlying question is: Is the police the counterweight to the youth?

**Youri Kravtchenko** That's a selection.

**Matthew Bareyre** What interested me was people, people who are able to seize my presence. I wanted things, not necessarily words, events, at any time, that seemed, commented, not taking into consideration the presence of the camera, that is, to be precise.

For example, Arthur, on the docks, of whom I already spoke, told me, at the end of the rush, “It’s weird to put words on it”. Sarah, on the terrace talking about loneliness, etc., I saw her every two weeks. She said to me: “To do what I did, that was crazy, that’s what I already told my parents, I never told my friends, I never told anyone in fact”. But that is to say, I was not looking for speech or opinions. I was not trying to get people to find truth about this or that topic.

I just wanted there to be, at some point, an expression that seemed to break with habits of the unsaid, silences. That's what I was looking for.

It was speech that was bursting out. And why? Because it was him, because it was me, because of the camera, that's it. That's why it came out like this. In fact, I gather something that happens for the first time before my eyes and the eye of the camera.

**Youri Kravtchenko** I have one more question. We are talking about you filming a lot in the past two years. I would like to have your day-to-day and your point of view on editing. Did you do it alone? Did you have to go back to it several times? I imagine that the way it is assembled necessarily generates different messages. When the music comes in, it is extremely subtle. So are the moments of silence. How did you get to the final edit?

**Matthieu Bareyre** So the editing, in terms of, how do I say, the timeline of the editing is not... I started digging while I was still shooting. I began the process of de-rushing with Sophia Colet, my co-author, in September 2016. For three months, we narrowed down non-stop. Everything we had filmed between May 2015 and, let's say, June 2016. So, for three months, we looked at everything. We looked at everything and started to make the selections with Sophia. Because obviously, de-rushing is one thing, but then the important thing is how do we classify the rushes, from what angle, under what themes?

Night, no. What kind of dialogue? Themes, why not. Places, why not. Oppositions, why not. I don't know about nature, the light, the darkness, how things like that work. These are things that I have tried for months. How to give order to all this? Then I went into a very intense filming period, but at the same time, I continued to do editing research. I thought about editing all the time, even while shooting, in 2015 as well. I was obsessed with it. I think at the beginning we had a film in mind that was about connection. To bring closer, how can I say it, excuse me it is a little far-fetched. I think that, at the very beginning, the project of the film was to delineate connections, passages, bridges, leaps between things, areas of our lives, of our lives when we are 18, 25 years old. When we individuate. On the one hand, there is family, the weekend, the week, work, the relation to politics. In fact, we keep a lot of things separate.

In fact, what interested me was to show that it was all linked. That there is no distinction between what intimacy is, the romantic, for example, and what the political context is in which we are. For me, what interests me is that all this communicates. So, the project of the film was a project of assembly. It was finding these connections. What took us a very long time was to see the link between each image, from image to image. To find similarities

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between the pictures, patterns, motives that

would take us from one person to the next.

For example, the only thing that remains from this stage of the film is the moment when I think I am connecting with Sarah, who is in Oberkampf, who talks about her teachers at Sciences Po. Sandra is holding the camera at that moment and says to her: “And you are down there to escape?”, “Yeah, to survive”. She makes a gesture of a plane using her arms. And just after that, I picked up Sophiane on the Champs Elysees, who is running and making the same gestures with her arms. That was what we had in mind, find the differences, distinctions. Lives that are made up of different arches of youth. Find pathways to try to get closer. To show that people are less frontal, superficial. Finally, we let go of all of that gradually. We broke away from it. Because it would be too much to require the viewer to perceive the idea we had. It took me some time to recognise an obvious thing, which is that it's up to the viewer to make their own connections. And so it's not necessary to edit terms on terms but rather to create distance.

So, I would say it's a film about correspondence rather than mirroring. Well, there is also something, I was very touched by Jean-Luc Godard's *Goodbye to Language*, which I went to see three times at the cinema in 2014 when it came out. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's a very dense film that I found dazzling and that inspired me for many different reasons. Technically, because Godard was very fascinated by everything camera, coming out of small cameras. And I like this technophile side.

And then there was this kind of density connecting the images. Godard does it in a very artistic way, with great independence from what he shows. So that's really a very powerful authoring gesture, but in fact, I realised that what I wanted was that somehow the audience would feel what I had felt being around these people. So, it still needed to be much less fragmented, and it would
benefit from having a sequenced approach. So, back to the editing project, which I enjoyed too. I got a taste for the rough cut. I wanted a very bumpy movie. I didn't want to do some kind of artistic film like Godard.

I've been listening to rap since I was a kid. In Godard, there is this mixer side. Great mix, pictures and sounds. I liked it a lot, so I went spontaneously to that, and then I realised that it was not possible, that it was necessary to let things unfold a little longer so that each person could exist in all their autonomy. So that we don't have the desire to compare people. The editing is not only there to compare but also to organise their independence, their singularity in fact.

There is also something in terms of editing, I finally started once I finished filming in June 2017. I threw myself without transition into editing and did it for months without stopping. For months until I crashed from exhaustion. I remember calling a friend, Laurie Lassalle, a filmmaker, and I said, “Damn it, I cannot do it anymore.” I also had a lot of pressure from the outside, production, distribution, etc. I needed to breathe, I needed someone to protect the film. And even to protect me because I think, after a while, I had been tense for more than two and a half years. At one point, I thought I must be more confident. I trust myself because I know why I want to save and protect it, but at the same time, I had no more strength.

So I called Laurie, and I asked her, “Do not you know anyone?”. And at the beginning, talking with her, I said, “Ah, I'm going to contact the editor who worked on Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche's films, like *Bled Number One*, *Wesh Wesh, What's Happening?*, *Dernier Maquis*”. They are great movies. Frankly, if you don't know them, they're extraordinary. *Wesh Wesh and Last Maquis* are among the greatest films of the 2000s.

The editor was Nicolas Bancilhon. He came to my house, and I showed him a montage version that

lasted 2:45. The guy saw the thing, and he said, “Well, I see where you are going”. But at the time I was editing, he was I think 40, 45, he had two children, he was busy. He said, “I feel like it’s going to be all-consuming, and I’m not going to be able to do it all the way”.

That's when I called Laurie, and I said, “Fuck, I don't know where to go”. And she said to me, “Ah, I just saw *Carne Viva* by Jean Charles Hue”.

I don't know if you know Jean Charles Hue, he did *Eat Your Bones, The Lord's Ride*, also incredible movies. And Laurie had seen his first film, which was almost impossible to find, because of questions of rights, he could not release it. She said to me, “Frankly, I don't know who edited the film, but the person who did it is who you need for *L'Époque*, she can bring it home”. I said, “Okay, good”. I did some research, especially watching *Carne Viva* and understanding the kind of editing that was done. Okay, I tell myself that I know why she said that to me. I find the contact info of the editor, who is a woman. I wrote to her in October 2017, October or November. She answers, and she says to me, “Well, let’s have a drink.” I see her again, and she says to me, “So, make it fun”. In the end she was the one to interview me. It's that simple.

I really wanted to show her the rushes of the final edit. And she said to me: “No, no, what I want to know is what you have in your gut. Is this movie really your life, or is it just a movie?” So, for two hours she talked to me, she asked me questions, etc. After two hours she said to me: “I think we're good, we can go ahead.” And so, she came to see a montage version. Then the movie ended, and she said, “Well, okay, let's go.” Even before mentioning production or money or anything. And this was very important, of course, because it made me specify my relationship to the film, and put myself in the movie as well, to find my place in it, my presence off-screen. All these are questions that may be obvious, but

we don't necessarily think about them. I tended to put myself entirely aside, to erase myself.

Aside from being my first night film, it's a film from which I'm missing, and people tell me that: “It's scary. It seems like stolen images. It feels like you're not there, like there was nobody. That the images were filmed by a camera that was running on its own”.

And then we worked on the editing for months, and it was still very, very hard, very intense. But there was this kind of constant dialogue, even if Isabelle is not the person, how do I say it, she's unpredictable. But I knew it was at least two of us crazy people behind the controls. I was no longer alone.

Youri Kravtchenko I have just one more question. I noticed a detail, the lack of domestic spaces. The absence of interior spaces. Of course, there are nightclubs, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I forgot some. Was it a choice, or is it merely that, in the end, your playground is the outdoor space? Suddenly, because we really have this powerful impression in the film that the characters evolve individually but also a sense of erased intimacy. They evolve and live in the vast terrain that is the city.

Matthieu Bareyre Yeah, clearly, it was in the concept of the film from the beginning. That is to say, I think that Charlie was important, January 7, 2015, the Charlie Hebdo attack. People at night gather at the Place de la République. I was there, it was a beautiful gathering. A gathering of mourning, a sort of silent gathering.

So that's something, to see this public space in Paris, which is so ravaged by trade and commercial industrialisation. Suddenly, there was a feeling that people were coming together who were feeling the same emotion, at least for something in common. I felt a kind of re-appropriation of the space that before was just functional. It was evening, it was a night gathering.

After the
11th, there was the big

parade with Sarkozy, Hollande, Netanyahu. A kind of political instrumentalization of collective emotion.

I thought there was a very 'national unity' aspect after Charlie. I told myself it's not possible, in fact. It's impossible, the splits will reappear. The divisions will appear even more violently. It's in the movie, it's there. In fact, people will need to express themselves.

A while ago someone was talking to me about a book by Emmanuel Tod that I have not read, but in any case, we talked about it. I know Tod a little. I don't know if you know Emmanuel Tod, a high-profile demographer who is quite interesting. He talked about Charlie as a totalitarian moment.

Personally, that's precisely what I felt. That is to say, there is more than one emotion that must be dealt with. There is more than one speech that can be held, and those who don't own this speech are indexed. I just said, it's not possible, it will have to overlap. The breaches will reopen, the splits will reappear. This thing, this call, reiterated by all the institutions, the norms, of how to say, of unity. I told myself that it was going to burst out and that it is in this context that I want to make the film. That is, to wait for people to speak. That freedom of expression really reappears.

Youri Kravtchenko Therefore, you need the night and public spaces. It's this soil that is fertile.

Matthieu Bareyre What interested me was precisely to go for intimate things that are not mentally reserved for the domestic space or private space; to find this in a space, in a place, in a time that is supposed to be the reign of superficiality, of illusion. There was a kind of paradox that seemed interesting, and I decided to make the film from inside this paradox.

Youri Kravtchenko Matthieu, thank you very much for coming. It's really a film of great accuracy and great subtlety, and from my point of view, it conveys hope.
Matthieu Bareyre is a director and documentary film critic. He made his first film, a medium-length film entitled *Nocturnes*, in 2016. From 2015 to 2018 Bareyre filmed young people in the streets at night and collected their stories in the film *L'époque*. "There is Paris after the Charlie Hebdo events, its order and spirit. There are young people at night. I wonder what keeps them awake." In this film, he explained his particular interest in night-time, saying: "During the day, people are stuck in their jobs, their daily routine. Encounters are rare. Whereas at night, you can say whatever you want. You choose the mask you want to wear. I walked around Paris for a long time before coming across the characters in my film. They had to be sincere."

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C I T Y

Think about the contemporary city. Beyond classic slogans of 'the city that never sleeps' regarding metropolises as distant as New York, Tokyo or São Paulo, the idea of the city, in its very episteme, is no longer associated exclusively with the existence of daylight.

The nocturnal dimension of a city is a time and space where much is at stake. Night is a time of simultaneous light and darkness, sleeplessness and rest. The city at night—what would one be without the other? Widespread artificial lighting has transformed the urban night into a second day, as highways, car parks, offices and streets are lit around the clock, abolishing the circadian rhythm of sunrise and sunset. Light constructs a space devoted to consumption and productivity. This space-time might be forcibly put to ever further uses in a rapidly changing global context.

Before designing the scenography, the students walked through the city of Lausanne at night in search of ordinary urban lighting infrastructure constructing the nocturnal public space. Through a process of abstraction in stages, they kept only the essence—the lighting and the structure—of common, banal architectural objects such as a bus stop, a lamp post, and a succession of ceiling lights forming, through the matrix they created, the underside of a gas station roof. To bring the city into the f'ar exhibition room, reference models were reduced to a 1:2 scale.

This evening allowed the audience to experience the night in a different way. Following a lecture about the urban night led by Isabelle Corten, lighting designer and activist, the public was invited to take their shoes and wandering eyes outside into the night with the experimental presence of Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade.

Students: Audrey Besanceney, Emma Birbaud, Emma Launay, Antoine Matta, Thu Trang Nguyen
HEAD - Genève Interior Architecture Department
Photos: © Lea Kloos

A PRESENTATION BY
ISABELLE CORTEN
f'ar Lausanne, 18.05.2019

In this presentation, Isabelle Corten, head of the Belgian agency Radiance 35 and member of the Social Light Movement association, explains her work as a mise en lumière, i.e. night as the scenography and nocturnal composition of the city. She also presents her collaboration with
**Lighting Designers Without Borders**

to improve the conditions of night-time illumination in developing countries, such as Haiti, illustrating the direct relationship between the quality of artificial light and improvement in social, economic, and cultural conditions.

Isabelle Corten So, good evening, happy to see that there are still a lot of people here at this time. I'm going to start by introducing myself. I'm an architect by training. Then I started studying urban planning in 1997, and I discovered
the world of light and night by chance in an architecture agency in Brussels, and it was something that interested me. It is precisely this other side of urban planning that is so compelling that it made me ask myself a lot of questions about neighbourhoods that are usually forgotten. And with this in mind, I developed an approach that is now integrated into my agency's work. My agency is located in Liège. Currently there are nine of us, and we work in the area of outdoor lighting. We work almost exclusively for public authorities based on the goal of how to make a city at night more pleasant. I have tried to approach this question from several angles, for instance, what if we work on the lighting of more heritage buildings or forgotten districts, including the very famous Molenbeek, photos of which you will see in my presentation. This happens within the framework of two associations, which are developing this approach specifically: Designers Light without Borders, of which I am president, and then another collective called the Social Light Movement, which brings together designers who are working on how to change the discourse and above all how to unlock budgets to intervene in forgotten neighbourhoods.

Today, I was invited because of the theme, 'The City, The Night', and specifically because of the walk that will happen later. It's true that to understand, to develop these three axes and this reflection on how to work in a city at night, the perceptions of architects and urbanists on landscapes, urbanism, the foreground and background are very useful. Of course, there are the technical insights that we learned in relationship to light. What is an external light? What are the techniques? But then there is the necessity of understanding its uses. What are the needs of a city at night, of a specific part of the city, of a unique district? How do we develop methodologies not only to understand

these uses and feelings but also to transmit what we do. We were discussing this earlier, before the conference, with the Stalkers. It's something quite difficult to communicate, this power of transformation of light or shadow, since we work with both these elements. So, today, I will explain the different methodologies.

The realisation of projects has a cycle that is identical to that of architecture. That is, we do an analysis of a site, a preliminary project, then there is the construction phase. So, we have developed three moments in time when the following possibilities of communicating with the different users present themselves. The first moment is when we approach the territory ourselves, as outsiders, using the principle of exploratory night walks, which I will explain later. The second moment occurs after we've already had thoughts that have arisen either from walking, if we have managed to do it, or from ideas with which we want to experiment with the different users. We have called it the "commented active walk".

One example is when we do a night walk involving organised exploration with the public authorities, although we never do it as late as today because then we have no public. And then the last step is 'guerrilla lighting', which is a methodology that English friends who are part of the Social Light Movement have developed. It's called guerrilla lighting because it's a war on bad lighting, and so it's a kind of 'light happening'. We use it more like a kind of teaser to communicate with the different users about what a neighbourhood could look like after the construction. We choose to express it in a rather festive way, to demonstrate the pleasure of transforming the material through light.

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© Audrey Laurent

So, the safety audits, what do they consist of? I would like to say beforehand that this is not at all the first time I have been to Lausanne. We have been working in Switzerland for about ten years. We first came by chance, having won a competition for the Quais du Seujet in Geneva. I'm here once or twice a month, so I know the place quite well. So, what does it consist of? It is a walk that is targeted at users, including our interlocutors from town hall and from different agencies such as the police and the parks department, as well as the different users such as residents, shopkeepers, etc. And so we walk around for about one, one and a half hours because it is this context that allows us to encounter different situations that are reproducible in the rest of the territory, conversations about participants' feelings about the night, what makes a public space attractive or not, why do we change routes after dark, what are the sensations we have in this public space. Several of us wear yellow vests—earlier we were talking about the connotation of yellow vests now, but hey, we still use them. So then, three or four of us take notes on the comments of the users and compile them into a report.

Since we have been in Belgium, we have done a lot of walking. We have done seven so far in Lille because we had a contract to do a series of safety audits for Lille. And then we've done quite a few since our first time in Lausanne. We did one in London, linked with the Social Light Movement, and we did three in Haiti linked with Lighting Designers Without Borders.

We propose this methodology even when we work on a project that is, for example, here in Antwerp, Belgium. In that case, the walks are done in different languages. We only worked on one public square, but nevertheless, we proposed walking around the different places surrounding the square, to reflect together on what the project could look like. I'm going pretty fast because I think it's more interesting to be able to have a dialogue with you later, so I hope there will be questions and exchanges at the end. So, the second methodology is the active walks. This is an example in Saint-Étienne, where we worked with City of Design on an experiment precisely on how specific changes in the night environment can influence behaviour. It was the first time I had proposed this; it came to me when they invited me to work with them. I said to myself, well, a classic walk is not part of the reflection, so why not go into the night space with the different users and literally activate a section of wall with light, because we were equipped with large portable torches. It was, therefore, possible to see if the perception of the place changed once we highlighted this fresco, for example, here in Saint-Étienne. Or whether it doesn't change at all, and what are the perceptions in that regard.

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© Radiance35

This is in Bourg-en-Lavaux. We had to work on site, and so we used all the research from a project we had done in Switzerland, on a lake shore. Is it possible, or not, to light up the lake shore? Is it interesting? Not only do we propose things, but we also give users the opportunity to try them out, which allows for a more concrete dialogue between us.
<figure><img src="image_99.png" /><figcaption>©Radiance35</figcaption></figure>

Now here, in Bourg-en-Lavaux, these are the paths from an analysis we had done based on the observation of the routes most taken, specifically during winter from 5 pm onwards. We also make maps of the temporality of the night, to try to understand these uses. In winter, some roads are used a lot, and we will think about how to light them without encroaching on the landscape. Again, this is one of the churches in Saint Etienne. What does it change, if anything, to have this lighting on the wall? Do we prefer it in the dark or not? And so the third participative approach is this guerrilla lighting, which is more festive.

But nevertheless, the intention is to show how space can be changed, as we explain to different interlocutors. And obviously, since we are in a festive atmosphere, we work with festive materials, i.e. faceted balls, coloured gelatine, etc., which will not be used in the actual project. Compared to the other two methodologies, it allows us to communicate with everyone. We don't need to understand the language, and it's quite interesting because, since it's very festive, we have a varied audience, including children and older people. So how does it work? We target three or four places and think about the concept of lighting. People come in, they don't know what they're going to do at all, we just give them 108 equipment, so these torches, these disco balls,

and these coloured filters. They are guided by team leaders who place them in specific locations. I direct and throw the thing with a foghorn, you know that football thing, and everyone turns on their light, so it has a 'wow' effect. We always have a photographer capture the moment. Then we turn off all the lights and move on to the next one. It lasts a few minutes, and it's quite interesting, and some people are amazed by the results.

<figure><img src="image_100.png" /><figcaption>© Audrey Laurent</figcaption></figure>

Then we post the photos on social media. There, for example, you see this is Schaerbeek (Brussels), one of the municipalities next to Molenbeek, where we worked. I was talking about the festive side, and it's true that I love the disco ball. We haven't yet managed to put it in a real project, but I think it has a rather impressive transformative power. There was also a project in Grenoble this winter. We worked on a public square, it was part of three weekends of participatory interventions on the night. So we had proposed having three evenings with three guerrilla events per evening, so nine in all. We called out to people in the square and told them, "Come and discover for yourself the power of light to transform, come and transform a place once night falls". And this is what it produced. It was easy in Grenoble because this square was magnificent, so there was support for projections that were quite interesting. But what's also fantastic is when all these people see these pictures, they feel very proud to have transformed a place like that.

This is actually the first guerrilla lighting we did ourselves because, before that, I participated in a series of guerrilla lighting events with my English colleagues. And this one is in the district of Schaerbeek, a disadvantaged neighbourhood that is just next to the North Station in Brussels. For this project we proposed work on a kind of scenography, a reasonably finished project, with lights that go from white to orange, punctuating the street. In the teaser for the site we used some elements of the language of the project, but we added this festive dimension. What is interesting in this photo, compared to the previous one, is to show that it is about everyday architecture. Here, all the people from the neighbourhood also came to see it, and it was interesting. And then at the end of these walks, these guerrilla lighting actions on the festive side, we distribute glow sticks, so the audience is involved, and we take a photo of light graffiti, which is quite impressive. A little anecdote, about the guerrilla lighting we did in Molenbeek, and about the guerrilla theme, which we managed to organise just after the 2016 attacks in Brussels. So, I might as well tell you that when I proposed guerrilla lighting to the Commissioner, it was a little complicated. So we had to change the name, and we called it a 'light happening', it always goes down better. But we still had to fight to do it and explain that it was something festive because the name can be confusing, especially in these neighbourhoods.

Here I did a preview, and I ended with this sentence by Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it's done." But here is a quick overview of the different methodologies used to understand the spaces we work with. This is the triple approach that I have been leading for twenty-five years in the night space, and with my agency, Radiance 35, with the Social Light Movement, as well as with Lighting 109 Designers Without Borders. We have chosen

to finish with some photos of the actions we are carrying out in Haiti.

<figure><img src="image_101.png" /><figcaption>©Radiance35</figcaption></figure>

The Lighting Designers Without Borders association is made up of a group of designers who met a little over ten years ago; it is based in France. I have been part of it for about eight years, and since then I have become its president. The principle of the association is to transmit our knowledge, as lighting designers, to people who cannot afford the fees of a lighting designer, and to develop a series of projects. When I arrived, I joined a project in Bamako, Mali, and then we developed a project based in Haiti, so here are just a few pictures, but you can see more on the association's website directly. Since 2010, precisely the day after the earthquake, we have been returning regularly in teams of 2 or 4 people to work on this mission, alongside a local association, in a series of districts that are in huge need, because there is almost no light and yet there is an active life as soon as the night falls. We approach the project in the same way as our others. This is a group of women, with whom we did an exploratory walk, and so we discussed with them the issues they were facing, especially in these informal neighbourhoods. And so we proposed solutions in partnership with the local association that we helped to form. These are sustainable solutions because they are the result of this participatory process I described, and also technically viable since we enter into dialogue with the various local distributors so that the equipment distributed is durable. We also make sketches on reflections around light, to find solutions that must be creative.
Isabelle Corten is an architect and town planner who specialises in public spaces and lighting. She has worked on the redevelopment of public spaces in Belgium and abroad. In 2001 she set up Radiance35, her own lighting agency with a team of 10 people. She has created many lighting blueprints and lighting schemes for churches, town halls, bridges, squares, and social housing in Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Corten is the President of Lighting Designers without Borders (cLSF), the co-founder of SLM (Social Light Movement) and a member of LUCI (Lighting Urban Community International).

Light and the city are central to Corten's concerns. Light cannot be confined within the overly restrictive constraints of a sometimes narcissistic exercise in style. Rather, it is an issue of social cohesion. Corten does not therefore limit herself simply to designing lighting or illumination for a site. She adds that extra something that is the hallmark of a resolutely political approach. Her training as a town planner leads her to constantly question the meaning of her approach. The town, a living space inhabited by men, women and children reflects its social framework. A street, a square, an avenue or a tree all become another prism through which to comprehend urban reality. It is therefore possible to develop different types of lighting to reflect a social order, as evidenced by Corten's work.

<figure><img src="image_102.png" /><figcaption>NIGHT ADRIFT IN LAUSANNE
with Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade, 18.05.2019</figcaption></figure>

Comprised of six Italian architects, the urban art laboratory Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade organises walks, wanderings and architectural actions at the edges of the city or at the margins of communities, with the aim of producing a new interpretation of the territory, both critical and political, and analysing and interacting with the emerging phenomena of the city. Stalker/

ON provides a new perspective on the city by offering to "listen to the landscapes [...] on the fringes of metropolises, away from the main communication routes". Stalker's work must be understood as a 'cultural product', i.e. a means of knowing and acting directly in an urban space punctuated with situations that are by nature mutating and uncertain.
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C L U B

Think about the nightclub and its culture of continuous excitement, excess, and life force. The craze for the exuberance of nightclubs has been well covered in recent years by the multi-sensory exhibitions at Villa Noailles and the Vitra Design Museum.

The nightclub embodies both the nocturnal public agora and the ultimate laboratory for technological and multimedia experimentation. As early as 1965, the Italian avant-garde became famous for the design of the *Piper Club*. Its architects saw discotheques as a new type of space for multidisciplinary experimentation and creative liberation. Aided by changing technology and post-war sexual liberation, these true public night spaces featured furniture that could be reconfigured for any situation and brought together innovations in art, architecture, music, theatre and technology.

Inspired by the Italian *Piper Club* and interested in exploring the potential of the night at its peak, the students built a night scene emblematic of our time: that of the discotheque, embracing in the process the codes and rituals of today. Using a white grid matrix on a black background, scaffolding and metal latticework, they staged an enigmatic and contemporary nightscape with an aesthetic straddling the line between today's wild raves and Lars von Trier's film *Dogville*.

Ensconced in a one-night club where visitors were encouraged to explore and use the space, architects Pol Esteve Castelló and Octave Perrault reflected respectively on nightclubs as architectural types and on the Cruising Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale, while architect Daniel Zamarbide gave an illuminating slam performance, *Peripheral Night Storylines*, transcribed here.

Students: Taomei Bengone, Astrid Mayer, Deborah Marolf, Camille

Nemethy, Julie Reeb, Annika Resin

HEAD - Genève Interior Architecture Department

Photos: © Jerlyn Heinzen

A
POL PRESENTATION
ESTEVE CASTELLÓ
f'ar Lausanne, 24.05.19

Pol Esteve Castelló My name is Pol Esteve Castelló, and I am an architect, a researcher, and a teacher. I teach at the Architectural Association, and I do research at the Bartlett, both in London. I also run a design studio, GOIG, between London and Barcelona. Today I will be mainly talking about my research on social dance spaces, which is related to the PhD thesis that I am currently working on at the Bartlett

in London. I will first explain where my interest in these spaces came from, and how my research became more of a methodological and disciplinary endeavour to a certain extent. For this I will be using words such as discotheque, nightclub, or spaces for social dancing, but in any case, what I'm interested in looking at is the emergence of these spaces as a typological space in architecture. My interest in social dance spaces started when I was a student in Barcelona at the technical school of architecture¹, which is a school that comes out of the tradition of the polytechnic,
and I was going out a lot in the city. I was being taught during the day about how Mies and Le Corbusier were designing—fantastic guys but rather dry let's say—and at night I was inhabiting spaces like the *Nitsa Club*, which is an important club in Barcelona occupying a former theatre, and *Torres de Avila*, a very weird place, a club imbedded in a fake historical structure that was built for the International Exhibition of 1929 along with the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies. Late in the 1990s, in a complex reproducing a village including traditional pieces of Spanish architecture, the architect of *Torres de Avila*, Arrivas, inserted his design into a building reproducing the historical towers of Avila. So, Barcelona at that moment, and particularly from the 1980s on, but still in the 2000s when I started going out, was a place full of interesting night architecture. It was exciting and different, and it had qualities distinct from the architecture that was being taught at the university. And that's how I started to be interested in the topic. I was interested in it for a while, and when I moved to London, I started to conduct research more rigorously, and among the first questions to come up were: How can I talk about this? What am I talking about exactly? Is the discotheque a rave? Is it a nightclub? What is it exactly that I am looking at? And how can I pull all these things together? I had the intuition that all of these kinds of spaces had something in common, but I didn't know exactly what the common factor was between a rave, for instance, and a club in New York from the 70s. There was a commonality despite the differences—the spaces are very different, the buildings are very different, the walls are different, the decoration is different—so what's the relationship? I was trying to analyse the pictures themselves to understand what it could actually be, what could be the common thread between this rave for instance, and this club, which is the **130 Piper** in Torino, one of the iconic clubs of the 60s.

<figure><img src="image_125.png" /></figure>

It was while looking through these pictures that I suddenly discovered some elements like the one that you can see here at the top, which is a piece by Bruno Munari. It's a kind of small device that projects light and moving images onto the walls. I started thinking, okay, what are these devices that appear in these spaces and what is their role in relationship to architecture. Then I found a text that was crucial for my research, by Roland Barthes, a French semiotician, who was sent by the magazine *Vogue Hommes* to the newest Paris nightclub in 1978, *Le Palace*, which was located inside an existing theatre that used to be a variety theatre. The whole text is fantastic, full of clever observations on how a discotheque actually works, but there was something to me that was very important from an architectural perspective, and it was this sentence: "The remarkable thing is not the technological prowess [...], but the appearance of a new art, in its material (a mobile light) and in its practice." He was saying that the discotheque was a new art, that you can translate it into a new architecture, and the material is the lighting itself. And that kind of clicked for me. These kinds of devices that I'm seeing in these spaces are the ones that are actually constructing the architecture, and the materials of this architecture are not the walls. That's why the walls are different in every club. It doesn't actually matter what walls and what decoration to some extent. What constructs the experience of a social dance space is the lighting.

<figure><img src="image_126.png" /></figure>

This picture from *Hacienda*, which is one of the most iconic clubs in Europe from the 80s, was also quite revealing to me, because most of the time this club is shown from another point of view, from a lower perspective, and it's mainly remembered for its application of colours to the columns, or for particular materials chosen by Ben Kelly, its designer. But when you look at the club from the top, you suddenly realise that all this equipment above your head is what is activating the experience, and when you are inside dancing, you don't even see the colour of the columns, so to a certain extent it is irrelevant. Finally, what made me realise that I was going in the right direction was finding the first regulatory text mentioning nightclubs. To date, this is the oldest regulation that I have been able to find that directly describes in legal terms what a nightclub is. The regulation was passed in 1979 in London by the Greater London Council. I really love the way it legally describes a discotheque: "For the purpose of this code, discos are defined as events characterised by loudly amplified music, dancing, flashing lights and mostly attracting people under the age of 30."² The last part is a bit ridiculous. I don't know what was happening at that time, but obviously anyone regardless of age can go to a discotheque. But the other parts are definitely relevant. Certainly, what defines a discotheque is not where it is, how big it is, or other parameters that could equally define a car park or other architectural typologies and programmes. What defines a discotheque is the presence of pulsating lights, changing lights, as well as a second element, amplified music. Thus, I came to the conclusion that my research pertains to the technologies that allow for the experience of the discotheque, or the experience of the dance club, to happen. While it definitely involves light and sound, something was missing.

So, I added, even if it was not in the regulation, a

third technology that is extremely important, which is psychotropic technologies, or in other words, drugs. Normally these technologies are never regulated by the same laws that regulate the other technologies. Typically it is city councils, not even at a state level, that regulate light and sound, while drugs are normally regulated through international treaties, like the Vienna Convention of 1973, which defines which substances are legal and which are not. And obviously these substances, together with light and sound, ultimately construct the experience of the club. So, my question at that moment was, okay, the club is constructed by these technologies, but where do these technologies come from? And who invented them? And why were they invented? I'm going to go a bit fast because I realise that my presentation is very long, and it's after 10 pm, so I will try to go a bit more quickly. What I realised is that, as is the case with other technologies, most club technologies, from flashing lights to neon lights to the laser, were all invented for a completely different purpose than the one they have in relation to dance culture. They were initially used in dermatology, or to investigate bodies in motion, etc., and then later translated, displaced for another use. Most of them were actually invented decades before discotheques came to be. It's only after the Second World War that there was a certain interest in revisiting these technologies and thinking about how they could be used in a different way. This happened with light technologies, but also, to a certain extent, with sound technologies, too, which were initially intended to record voices and then used to reproduce music. Sound was also used as a weapon at a certain point. Lower frequency speakers, which later became subwoofers, were used as a weapon to activate the bowels of the adversary so that they could no longer fight. Most of these technologies were tested either in laboratories or in wartime by the military, as in the case of drugs or
<caption>A picture of Ricardo Urgell, owner of *Pacha*, and other materials related to the *Pacha* clubs in Ibiza and Sitges.</caption>

psychotropic technologies. Only recently have classified files of the American military come out revealing that MDMA had been tested extensively to understand how it could be used as a chemical weapon. So, all these technologies originally had different purposes, and at some point someone had to rethink what to do with them. This turning point is what I wanted to shed light on. I thought my work to a certain extent was complementing or continuing the work of Sigfried Giedion, an art and architecture historian whom I really love, who published the fantastic book *Mechanization Takes Command*. He was basically trying to trace the anonymous history of mechanisation in relationship to space, namely, how houses and public spaces, factories and private life incorporate mechanisation. What is interesting here is that Giedion traces a direct connection between mechanisation and optimisation of body movements. He claims, and the diagram here by Frank B. Gilbreth is a study of this, that a factory worker is conditioned to perform movements in the most effective way, in order not to waste time and to be more productive, and that the same thing happens in a house, namely when you invent a compact kitchen, the effect is exactly the same, as the homemaker wastes less time producing food and thus has time to do something else in the house as well, so she is actually managing the full house herself. Behind this there was also the idea that mechanisation was controlling the body and the performativity of the body. What happens later, when certain technologies change their role and begin to work in a different way—here is my hypothesis, and we will get to that later—is that they liberate the body, they re-eroticise the body and give back to it the freedom it had lost through mechanisation. Before these technologies came together in the discotheque, they were first tested in laboratories,

132 mainly in North America, the UK and Europe. They

administered drugs to people and exposed them to flashing lights, and surprisingly they discovered that, when you are exposed to flashing lights or a stroboscope blinking at a certain rhythm, the electromagnetic waves of your brain change. The alpha waves are the waves that are activated in your brain when you are not engaged in purposeful thinking. So when you close your eyes for instance, you have more alpha waves, which also happens when you're exposed to a stroboscope. If on top of that you are taking certain drugs, the effect is compounded. This is a somewhat scientific explanation of the experience of the discotheque: exposed to flashing lights you can lose yourself, you can lose your subjectivity, you can experience a certain jouissance. In my study, I focused on Europe because, even if there is no agreement on where the first discotheque emerged—there is actually no official history and no book to check, there are many little histories around on internet blogs by people who know something— yet there is some evidence that it first started in Europe between the 50s and 60s and then moved to America, where disco as a musical genre took off in the late 60s and 70s.

<figure><img src="image_127.png" /></figure>

So, I decided to focus on Europe, and the iconic place to look for nightclubs in Europe is obviously Ibiza. One of the most renowned nightclubs in Ibiza is *Pacha*. Maybe you know it. If not, I can tell you it was one of the first nightclubs, and among the most important. Ricardo Urgell, this guy here, who at that time was building the club in Ibiza, in one of his interviews⁴ he says that, while he built this club in Ibiza, he first opened another club in Sitges. The one in Ibiza opened in 1973, and the one in Sitges in 1967, but even when he opened the

<caption>Postcard from Platja d'Aro in the 1960s.</caption>

club in Sitges, it was inspired by the clubs he had seen in the most fantastic place, Platja d'Aro. Platja d'Aro is this village on the northern Mediterranean coast of Spain where the typology of the discotheque, let's say of the Mediterranean, was tested at the very beginning. I discovered that most of the early dance clubs in the late 50s and 60s appeared around the Mediterranean coast in close connection with the phenomenon of tourism. There was actually this idea of having a space and a place where you could loosen up your body for a while. An influx of money from northern Europe would foster it, since citizens from the more industrialised cities of northern Europe would come to the south, particularly to the coast, and spend on leisure and going out, on having enjoyable experiences, which could be made into a business. Most of the experiments with technology, which were not cheap but rather quite expensive, took place in this context. So, I used Platja d'Aro as a case study to understand the origins of the discotheque. Platja d'Aro is the name of the municipality, and there is a beach called S'Agaró. There, in the 20s, a master plan by the famous Catalan architect Rafael Masó was implemented to build a vacation town. The architecture merged with the landscape. It was built for the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the emerging Catalan bourgeoisie, to go there on holiday. It became an international hotspot and, already in the 30s, you could find a local magazine published in four languages. You would have the editor of the *Herald Tribune*, the editor of *Life* magazine going there to spend their vacations. And there were obviously parties at night. These magazines were depicting the parties, all of which had orchestras, or concerts of classical music or more folkloric music, and they were mostly happening in the open air. But then later there was the civil war, there was a break, and after the civil war, Spain entered a dictatorial regime, and with the dictatorship, there was a renewed interest in

promoting tourism as a form of making money. This is exactly the same beach 30 years later with all these architectural developments.

<figure><img src="image_128.png" /></figure>

This is when the first discotheques started to appear, this is Platja d'Aro in the 60s. This is the first club I found that was registered as a club with a license to play music electronically. They didn't have an orchestra nor the specific license for it. So, in the registry of the city council you can find that they were given the license to have a turntable. It was located in an existing farmer's house, so actually the house, the typology was not purpose-built. The only thing they were asked to do was to block the stairs to the bedrooms so there could not be prostitution. By 1959 already there were two clubs in Platja d'Aro designed more consciously, because they re-thought the typology of the space in order to design a 'boîte' or discotheque specifically. For the very first time they were using the term 'pista de baile' (dance floor). Before that, the term 'dance floor' had not appeared on any floor plan, but here, for the first time, the architects were actually specifying that this was a 'dance floor'. These were the two dance clubs as they were published in *Cuadernos de Arquitectura*, an important architecture magazine at the time. What is interesting about these clubs is that they had two dance floors and that they had a completely enclosed perimeter. They had no windows, they had no contact with the exterior, they were directly linked to the motorway, and they had a car park. They worked as one piece of this tourism ecosystem that included apartments, hotels, beaches, etc., to which people could travel by car. At night they could go to these spots, the nightclubs, and have
fun in them, disconnected from the exterior. That's why you have no views of the beach, no relationship, except for the vegetation in the landscaping. This was the first nightclub that introduced not only stereophonic sound but also light in a very particular way, where the dance floor had light that sparkled underneath it. The dance floor was made of glass, and you could dance on top, and it would illuminate you. Again, here there is no connection to the exterior. The plan is quite neat. There is this empty space in the middle, and for the first time also, which will become a quite common characteristic of the early discotheques, you can find rooms for the employees to sleep in. Often, the discotheques had employees living in-house. The first very famous club in Platja d'Aro was *Tiffany's*, and as you can see from the exterior, it is nothing special, just a white piece of architecture.

<figure><img src="image_129.png" /><figcaption>Exterior view of *Tiffany's* in Platja d'Aro in 1969. © PDAV.</figcaption></figure>

It could be in Ibiza, it could be in Platja d'Aro, it doesn't really matter. The important thing actually happens inside. This club was also built next to the road. It was built over two years, from around '64 to '65. The most interesting point is that the architect noted in the floor plans where the turntables had to be located. This is the first time that I found a plan where an architect identifies where the DJ stands. In this club, this was where the DJ stood in 1965. It is somewhat weird because it looks like a kind of fireplace, but it's full of electronic technology, so it's like looking at a Frank Lloyd Wright plan with the fireplace in the middle, but instead what you have is this weird machinery that activates the whole sound and lighting system. The guys that established this club were Swiss. It was quite common for dance clubs to be set up collaboratively. It

was never just one person behind them, it was normally a group of people. Before this club, they had another small beach bar farther north on the coast, called *San Trop*, and apparently that is where they tested out the application of sound and lighting technologies. Then, because their first venue was so successful, they decided to invest in Platja d'Aro. Here we have the first example of a built-in DJ booth.

<figure><img src="image_130.png" /></figure>

And that was not all. One contraption they tested, which was invented jointly by the DJ and the owner, not even the architect, was these ceilings full of stalactites with lights in them that would sparkle over the dancers. That was the main revolution of this club, and the newspapers reported on it at the time: you go there, and there is this sparkling ceiling full of lights that blind you. It was shocking at that time to have this amount of technology installed in an interior space. Shortly after *Tiffany's* came *Maddox*, maybe one of the more representative clubs of Platja d'Aro.

<figure><img src="image_131.png" /></figure>

Behind it was a group made up of a local entrepreneur, another entrepreneur from Barcelona, and an Italian architect who had studied at the polytechnic in Milan, had moved to Venezuela and then come back to Italy, and had finally ended up on the Costa Brava. They also called in a lighting designer with a background in experimental theatre in Italy who had worked on the *Piper Club* in Rome. So, it was an international mix of people who came together to create this club. From the exterior it's also quite

a simple building, no windows, only one access door, and no connection at all to the outside. It's completely insulated, so from the outside you cannot hear the noise coming from the inside. The architect conceived this sculpture as an idea for the club. He said it actually needed to be a completely fluid space allowing the spirit of the new era to come to play. He was a bit new age. It was already the late 60s, this was 1967, and he came up with this plan, which was full of circles, with the service areas located towards the perimeter.

<figure><img src="image_132.png" /><figcaption>Technical drawings of *Maddox's* lighting devices by Lumex S.A. © Carmenati family.</figcaption></figure>

There were two dance floors, and for the first time here, the DJ was given a prominent, elevated position, which is this place here, next to which is the machinery to amplify the music. So, this is what the interior looked like, full of futuristic stalactites as well. There was something about the stalactites, everyone liked them. And the light was also coming from these elements in the ceiling. For me this was one of the crucial drawings for my investigation, because it is the first time I saw an architect draw a DJ playing in the DJ booth.

<figure><img src="image_133.png" /><figcaption>Drawings of the DJ booth in *Maddox* by Vincenzo Carmenati. © Carmenati family</figcaption></figure>

So, this is the DJ booth, from where the DJ could control everything, and there you have the section and the elevation. The funny thing is that, obviously, he was not using the term DJ, as the word was not common at that time, so he called it the 'operator deck'. There was an understanding that there was an architectural director, the architect, and there

was a director who would control the atmosphere of the space, 'the operator'. Like in Cedric Price's *Fun Palace*, there is machinery that can activate and deactivate certain atmospheric parameters, so people can have fun there during the night. This is the appearance of the DJ booth. At that time they were using both vinyl records and cassette tapes. Actually DJs initially used cassette tapes, not vinyl records, but at that moment they had already introduced vinyl. And there were some famous DJs—their names are not well known—who worked at that place for years. But that was not all. Obviously at that time they did not yet have commercially produced lighting devices for discotheques, so they had to design all these devices, as Bruno Munari did for the *Piper*. These are some of the devices they designed for this club, and there were many more.

<figure><img src="image_134.png" /></figure>

They had different applications and were designed in collaboration with an engineering company that was external to the core group of designers. What they managed to obtain was this: a ceiling full of lighting effects. In these kinds of pictures it's difficult to capture the full visual expression, but one of the owners described the experience of the space as a white pulsating box that transports you to a cinematic space. A relationship was often traced between the experience of this interior and cinema, and most newspapers related it to psychotropic experiences. This is another image of the interior, completely full of people. These are some of the examples from Platja d'Aro, but obviously there were more. It was said that on a typical night there could be about 20,000 people having fun in the discotheques of Platja d'Aro.
<figure><img src="image_135.png" /></figure>

These are some of the images that I really like, that capture the interaction of the lights with the bodies, the movements and the position of the bodies at different points. One of the arguments that Roland Barthes makes when he talks about the discotheque in Paris, which is actually ten years later than this, is that the most interesting aspect of visual relationships, or the visual regime within those spaces, is that, while in the theatre there is an audience and there is a protagonist, here obviously everything is twisted around and everyone becomes both audience and protagonist, and you are immersed in this space of crossed perspectives. At the same time body movements are interrupted by the flashing lights, which provokes a completely different reading of the performativity of the body. These are two other pictures of..., I think it's 1971. Oriol Regàs, who was one of the directors of Maddox, was associated with the Gauche Divine, which was the progressive intellectual bourgeoisie of the time in Catalunya, and which somehow was also related to the Barcelona School of Film, a quite overlooked experimental group of filmmakers from that time. Lately there have been some studies of this experimental school of cinema from Barcelona in relationship to post deconstructivism theories and Deleuze's readings of cinema, etc. There is a relationship to the kind of spatial experience of the discotheque as a place without context, because you are completely disconnected from the exterior, and these spaces that obviously work through lighting to reconstruct a certain narrative of time disconnected from 'natural' time. We have talked about light, and we have talked about sound, but drugs

were also very important in Spain. During the Franco era, Spain was not party to many international drug treaties, which meant you could go to the pharmacy and basically buy amphetamines. Spain was known as the pharmacy of Europe, because it was a free-for-all drugstore, since you didn't need any prescription. These are some of the brands that you could buy over the counter at a typical drugstore. So, all these clubs were partially fuelled by the consumption of these drugs, which were at the time completely legal drugs that would be consumed by both the clubgoer and the housewife just the same, so it was not unique to clubs. Here we come to the conclusion, with a final point. The previous club I showed, *Tiffany's*, opened in 1965, and in 1969 there was a group of activists, communists, anarchists—it was not entirely clear because they were very young and didn't themselves know what they were seeking—but what they did know is that they were fighting against Franco's regime, they were fighting against the dictatorship, and they understood that tourism had a direct link with the dictatorship, that tourism was actually economically fuelling the dictatorship. Actually, there was also criticism from intellectuals from Catalunya, like Josep Pla, who was an important writer and commentator of the time, who said that under the Franco regime all industries are controlled, you cannot do anything outside the regime's control, except for tourism, where you can build whatever you want, you can do whatever you want on the coast, no one will stop you because they omitted to regulate the sector in order for business to proliferate, money to flow and the political system to endure. This group of politicised young people decided they wanted to put a bomb in a discotheque, so one of them stole some dynamite from a quarry and went into *Tiffany's*, and put a bomb there. They caught him as he was trying to escape after placing the bomb. The discotheque was full of people, and although the bomb didn't explode, he was arrested. The

case was brought to, I don't know the exact word in English, I think it's a court martial, un 'concilio de guerra'. They decided that this was a terror attack against the nation, and these guys were tried, and one of them went to prison for many years. So let me come to my conclusion and set forth some of my ideas supporting it. At the beginning I think I was quite naive when I was doing all this research and thinking that the discotheque was always a kind of apparatus, that it was a kind of device that was acting as a counterpart to the mechanisation of labour, that it was an advanced technological device that could liberate the body, that could liberate the post-industrial body and bring back a certain freedom of speech, and when I say speech I don't mean speaking with words but actually speaking through performativity, through gesture. But suddenly when I started to look more in depth at the emergence of discotheques on the coast, I realised that there was another aspect to all of that, which is an aspect Lefebvre talks about. Henri Lefebvre is a French thinker who analyses what he calls the neo-colonisation of the Mediterranean coast through the tourism industry. Funnily enough, one of the images in his recently published manuscript *Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment<fnref n="5" />* is a picture of Lefebvre in Sitges, the place where the first *Pacha* started. His theory on the Mediterranean coast was elaborated along with Mario Gaviria, a Spanish sociologist. They both worked together analysing the impact of these new forms of spatial colonisation. I find it extremely interesting because, while on the one hand I really believe there is a component in the discotheque that aligns with these ideas of neo-colonial exploitation, there is also a counterpoint to it. Another theoretician, Douglas Crimp, who took notes about his experiences going out in nightclubs in New York in the 70s, said, and I'm not going to read it because it's quite long, but basically he

wondered how long it would take to make a

machine that could produce ecstasy and pleasure artificially. It was a rhetorical question, but obviously the discotheque can somehow produce this physical pleasure, as scientifically demonstrated if we consider alpha waves. But I think what you have in there, he says, is a very primitive pleasure, a kind of jouissance. I think, at the very beginning in Spain, the discotheque could produce a certain form of enjoyment, while it was also a way of converting space into an object of consumption. One of the aspects that interests me quite a lot as well is the commercialisation of these spaces: all these nightclubs had actual merchandise, the space begot merchandising. So, you have t-shirts, you have flyers, you have booklets, you have records, you have absolutely everything, and you have shops. So, what they are selling is an experience, it's a spatial experience. So, in the sense of Lefebvre, if we interpret it from a more radical point of view, obviously what was created there through tourism money and technological capacity was the illusion of the liberation of the body, but at the very same time putting forward a form of spatial consumption in contemporary terms: the consumption of experiences. That's it, thank you.

Pol Esteve Castelló is an architect, researcher and teacher. Their work focuses on the relationship between space, technology and perception with an interest in non-canonical architectures, histories, and bodies. They are the co-founder of the architecture office GOIG based in London and Barcelona. They are currently a Studio Master in the Architectural Association and a PhD candidate at the Bartlett, UCL.

<footnote n="1">1 Escola Tecnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB) belonging to Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Roland Barthes, "At Le Palace Tonight", *Vogue Hommes*, no. 10, May 1, 1978.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Siegfried Giedion, *Mechanization Takes Command* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 *Pachá, el arquitecto de la noche*, directed by Miguel Bardem (Spain: EndemolShine Iberia, 2015).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Henri Lefebvre, *Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment*, ed. Łukasz Stanek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).</footnote>
CRUISING ARCHITECTURE

by Octave Perrault
f'ar Lausanne, 24.05.19

1. Cruising usually describes the search for sex between homosexual men in public spaces, but it cannot be reduced to either men or gays. Cruising is a sexual practice that generally takes place in public places like parks, toilets, and parking lots, or in dedicated establishments like bathhouses and sex clubs.

2. By performing a hyperbolic version of masculinity through the use of rough concrete, bricks, wires, military patterns, and so on, these spaces transform these features into drag king ornamentation.

3. Darkness, corners, nooks, passages, peep holes, wet surfaces, lubed shapes: all of these anti-modernist design tropes are used to facilitate activities and relationships that have been designed based on the city.

4. Somewhere between anti-architecture and vernacular, cruising is the illegitimate child of the hygienist morality of the metropolis.

5. Grindr has generated a new psychosexual geography spreading across vast architectonics of interconnected bedrooms that have shifted the formerly democratic idealism of former cruising. Today, class, race and gender might be as regulated by the erotic surface of the screen as the architecture of the city.

6. How to deal with the contradiction of exposing practices that, most of the time, have emerged and continue to develop against and despite a public view from which they are in fact trying to escape?

Octave Perrault is a French architect, teacher and writer. He holds an MA in Architecture from the School of Architecture Association and an MA in Sociology and Culture from Goldsmiths University in London. Together with artist Rasmus Myrup and curators Pierre Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssoz, he initiated and curated the *Cruising Pavilion* project, which was created for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2018. This project aimed to shed light on so-called homosexual architecture as well as architecture that is representative of the cruising culture. At the same time, Perrault works for the architectural firm DP Architects in Paris and teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture in Versailles. He is co-founder of the London-based artists and architects collective Ayr, which studies contemporary domesticity through exhibitions and performances.

**CRUISING FREESPACE** describes a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture's agenda, focusing on the quality of architecture itself.

**CRUISING FREESPACE** focuses on architecture ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of stronger.

**CRUISING FREESPACE** celebrates architecture capacity to find additional and unexpected generosity in each project — even within the most private, defensive, exclusive or commercially restricted conditions.

**CRUISING FREESPACE** provides the opportunity to emphasise nature's free gifts of light, sunlight and daylight, air, gravity, materials, natural and man-made resources.

**CRUISING FREESPACE** encourages reviewing ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the world, of inventing solutions where architecture provides for the well being and dignity of each citizen of this fragile planet.

**CRUISING FREESPACE** can be a space for opportunity, a democratic space, an programmeal and free for uses not yet conceived. There is an exchange between people and buildings that happens, even if not intended or designed, so buildings themselves find ways of sharing and engaging with people over time, long after the architect has left the scene. Architecture has an active as well as a passive life.

**CRUISING FREESPACE** encompasses freedom to imagine, the free space of time and memory, binding past, present and future together, building on behelred cultural layers, weaving the archaic with the contemporary.

<figure><img src="image_136.png" /><figcaption>Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings
Still from Gaby (digital video, 7:55)
2018</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_137.png" /><figcaption>The Hollywood Spa
Advertising poster
1980s</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_138.png" /><figcaption>Robert Getso
NYC Go-Go (Postcards from the Edge)
2014</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_139.png" /><figcaption>Albrecht Dürer
Bath House (woodcut, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
Circa 1496</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_140.png" /><figcaption>Andreas Angelidakis
Cruising maze for Butt Magazine
2011</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_141.png" /><figcaption>Eating Oyster with boxing gloves, naked, on the nth floor
Illustration by Madelon Vriesendorp for Rem Koolhaas, Delirious
New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The
Monacelli Press)
1978</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_142.png" /><figcaption>General Idea
AIDS Wallpaper (hand screenprint on wallpaper; Museum of
Modern Arts (MOMA), New York)
1988</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_143.png" /><figcaption>The Catacombs' fisting area
San Francisco
1970s</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_144.png" /><figcaption>Pol Esteve Castelló & Marc Navarro
Atlas of Plans: Barcelona Dark Rooms
2007</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_145.png" /><figcaption>Robert Yang
The Tearoom (video game)
2017</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_146.png" /><figcaption>Shu Lea Cheang
I.K.U, I-robosex (film)
2001</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_147.png" /><figcaption>Office for Political Innovation (Andres Jaque)
Intimate Strangers (multimedia installation, London Design
Museum)
2016</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_148.png" /></figure>

## PERIPHERAL NIGHT STORYLINES

A slam performance by Daniel Zamarbide
f'ar Lausanne, 24.05.19

Daniel Zamarbide Not that long ago during a lecture situation not so different from this one but in Zurich, I participated in a quite brief and not so useful symposium on architecture. The event was hosted and moderated by the director of the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel, Andreas Ruby, who introduced my practice as one that navigates the peripheral waters of the architectural ocean. I was presented as a tangential architect who develops his work in the suburbs of the profession.

This approach to my work, especially coming from someone whose intelligence and culture are not in question, intrigued me at the time and has since continued to raise questions about how the profession's contours are drawn and by whom. Obviously, I understand what Andreas Ruby meant to convey in his quick introduction, and in that context, there was not much time for subtle presentations. But the very idea of having to distinguish between a central and a peripheral architecture still troubles me somewhat.

I would like to use this presentation of about twenty minutes to articulate a sort of reaction to this identity that was brought up during that session in Zurich. Exclusion and inclusion practices are at play in this exercise, and I am quite uncomfortable with those rituals. Departing from that rather anecdotal moment (and my purpose is not at all to question or criticise Ruby's eloquence in any way), I would like to contribute a critical position to today's panel. The usage of the word 'periphery' in this context is a very interesting sign of how architecture is culturally considered and perceived.

143 I propose a moment to revisit the central

importance of peripheral practices. It will be a quite superficial and fragmented journey into history.

The context of this lecture is particularly relevant to this topic, as we have seen in the previous lectures (Octave Perrault and Pol Esteve Castelló) on club culture and what could be identified as queer spaces. These are clearly not central work or design approaches; they also belong in the periphery. The culture of clubbing and of the club as a space, a heterotopian one, is certainly appreciated (if it is even noticed at all in mainstream cultural considerations) or actually, depreciated, as a marginal space due to its wild, entertaining, degenerate, ornamented, savage nature.

These words I employ are not by any means naïve and seem quite à propos in dealing with this issue. First because in French, in the electro and techno music culture, sauvage is used to refer to illegally organised parties often taking place in natural environments and engaging a community of people around music, food and drinks, and the use of drugs to augment collective experiential feeling. To continue with the metaphor of the sauvage, there is something that could be viewed as primitive or even animalistic in these momentary social events. They constitute a departure from the regular urban habits of city rituals, a way to escape the normative nature of collective civil behaviours and a way to experience collective ecstasies. This can only happen outside the centre, in the margins. It is not without a note of perversion, or provocation, that I am borrowing these terms—primitive, savage, degenerate—from an old 'colleague', whose oral and written power is very well known, proclaiming him one of the key characters of modernism. HEAD very successfully re-enacted his American Bar.

“But whoever goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down to
design a wallpaper pattern is either
a rogue or a degenerate. Lack of
ornament has pushed the other arts
to unimagined heights."¹

His provocative work *Ornament and Crime*, often quite poorly understood by many followers of minimalist and post-minimalist culture, has produced another community under the slogan of “less is more”. Another placeholder without much content in its utilisation.

As you know, the polemical boutique decorator Adolf Loos used these terms—primitive, savage, degenerate—to point to or define the art of peripheral populations such as the indigenous peoples of New Guinea, the Papuan.

The dawn of the 20th century sees the tracing of a new historical beginning, which has lasted until today. We have often seen, in many architectural schools, the term ‘decorative’ used as a means to criticise a given intervention or project. In the architectural idiom of those educational contexts, decorative implies useless, superficial, most probably feminine as well, a clear de-valorisation of the practice of decorating as a minor one.

The lines of 20th-century modern history are built upon moments such as this one. The exclusively masculine nature of the characters that fill the official books on modernism tells a quite insular or exclusive story of architecture. The paradoxes, complexities, anomalies and cracks in the naturally multifaceted activities and practices that were related to architectural design seem to have vanished from the second Bauhaus onwards. Architecture from then on articulates mainly around two powerful ideologies: fast-growing capitalism and its equivalent opponent, communism, both heroic and in need of a 'Baukultur' that will enable their power to take root through architectural monuments that implement their political

144 agendas into a societal project.

The Second World War will contribute to spreading or even support the idea of a militant architecture that helps reconstruct a destroyed world.

The common progress of arts and applied arts movements everywhere in Europe (German Werkbund, Viennese Secession, Catalan Modernism, Belgian and French Art Nouveau, French Art Déco, English Arts and Crafts, Dutch De Stijl, etc.) developed collectively into a cul-de-sac ending with the first Bauhaus, with the figure of the very beautiful Gesamkunstwerk Sommerfeld House in Berlin.

Twelve years after the publication of Adolf Loos' text, the school that marked the century and is still today a benchmark when it comes to design, architecture and creative pedagogies, chose to build as its manifest a villa, whose architecture is rather questionable, but whose decorative realm is extremely developed and present.

The exciting, holistic, and decorative modernity of the Sommerfeld House would soon be replaced by another type of modernity, central and dominant, positivist, hygienic, technocratic, which sought to eradicate any superficial element, violently discarding the decorative as degenerate. After that, the practices of 'otherness' were forced to evolve in the margins, disappearing in invisible heterotopian spaces that naturally went unmentioned.

At this point of the lecture, it may be useful to bring in the evolution of ethnography and anthropology as an obvious tool to talk about centrality and periphery. From an ethnographical point of view, architecture is most certainly one of the few fields that can unscrupulously, without any critical distance, quote *Ornament and Crime* literally (and often proudly) without even imagining the hidden (is it really?) power and instrumentality of such terms.

Levi Strauss:

“Le barbare, c’est d’abord l’homme qui croit à la barbarie.”

“Chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage.”

“Et pourtant, il semble que la diversité des cultures soit rarement apparue aux hommes pour ce qu’elle est: un phénomène naturel, résultant des rapports directs ou indirects entre les sociétés; ils y ont plutôt vu une sorte de monstruosité ou de scandale; dans ces matières, le progrès de la connaissance n’a pas tellement consisté à dissiper cette illusion au profit d’une vue plus exacte qu’à l’accepter ou à trouver le moyen de s’y résigner.”²

The development of ethnography and anthropology corresponds quite interestingly to the production of attempts to create a certain counterculture in architecture, one that would question, and sometimes fight, the predominant modernism. But these practices that take root in the 1940s, emerge in the 1950s, and explode in the 60s and 70s will again be marginalised with the advent of the consumption era, with the 1980’s celebrated in architecture with the new post-modernism.

These thirty or so pre-1980s years are where most of my cultural background comes from, and my work in dialogical companionship establishes a confrontational attitude towards it. The length of this presentation does not allow me to develop in depth the sometimes intimate, sometime more distant relationship that the projects I work on maintain with the histories or storylines of architecture. They walk alongside other storylines, establishing loose associations with art and architecture, passing freely from fictional and narrative lines to physical and built environments, with or without much control. Similarly to what you have in front of your eyes and ears, the projects I work on travel within incompletely

145 defined links that establish relations

between architecture and other
fields or creative practices.

These other practices are as peripheral as Ant Farm’s inflatables, Bruce Naumann’s bleachers and stair structures, the built utopian dreams of Paolo Soleri, Rosemarie Castoro’s metal urban ghosts, the unknown modern pioneer architecture of Irving Gill, Anne Tyng’s space frames, the culturally and politically engaged set designs of Carlo Scarpa, Mary Otis Stevens’ Lincoln House, the orchestrated explosion and Pink Floyd music of Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni, the other culture of explosions of fundamental artist Judy Chicago and her Dinner Party architectural projects, the strength of Charlotte Perriand’s designs, Luis Buñuel’s dining room in the Exterminating Angel, the Venus pavilion architecture of Salvador Dalí for the New York International Exhibition in 1939, Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s abovementioned Sommerfeld House, the hybrid decorative spaces of Josef Frank, the mysterious gardens of Bomarzo, the psychotic nightclub architecture of Carlo Molino, the exhibitions of Harald Szeemann or Jeremy Deller, the site and history of Monte Verità, Christian Marclay’s sound installations, Frederik Kiesler’s Film Arts Guild Cinema, Louise Bourgeois’ Cells, Lynn Margulis’ Gaia theory and symbiogenetics revision of our interrelational nature, the Whole Earth Catalogue, the night scenes in the best Michael Mann movies (Thief, Heat, Manhunter), Charles Eames and George Nelson’s Sample Lesson for a Hypothetical Course, Ugo Lapietra, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, Esther McCoy’s Five California Architects, Alison and Peter Smithson’s Sudgen House, and Donna Haraway’s essential contribution to revising our overly andro- and anthropocentric and human-exceptional history (with Bruno Latour).

Returning to the question of
ornament, its liquidation and
how minimalism endorsed its
disappearance, I would like to comment on one of the most relevant and important pieces of art in my view, which marked me as a student, as one of my professors, artist Christian Marclay, was strongly influenced by it. I am speaking of the 1952 piano sound piece 4'33, played by David Tudor and composed by John Cage.

I became interested in minimal techno by immersion, living in the creative milieu of the Geneva squat culture of the 1990s. But I entered the electronic sound world as a popular extension of musical experimentations similar to those of Cage. For those who don't know, the piece 4'33 basically consists of a time interval, as conveyed by the title, entirely occupied by the absence of played sound, a written sequence of silences. What happened during the very first live performance in 1952 was a reversal of the audience's expectations. The only sounds that were heard in the room came from a scandalised public, enraged by what they considered a fake concert, not by the piano or the interpreter's skills. John Cage's proposition followed a crucial discovery that he had made. Writing about Christian Marclay's work, art historian Jean Pierre Criqui describes this moment:

> "Avant même tout évènement sonore susceptible d'être répété, remis en jeu, transformé, nous aimons à penser qu'il pourrait y avoir eu le silence. Le silence comme condition originelle, générative, des phénomènes audibles – toile de fond vierge sur laquelle ceux-ci viendraient se détacher. Mais on connaît le problème, ou paradoxe, auquel nous confronte un silence absolu : dans la mesure où il peut être créé en laboratoire, il n'en demeure pas moins un silence pour personne, et l'individu se trouvant en pareil situation, aussi indemne soit-il du moindre acouphène, entendra alors la rumeur de son propre organisme au travail. C'est ce dont John Cage fit l'expérience dans une chambre anéchoique de

Harvard et qui le conduisit à réviser sa conception du silence, révision dont devait se montrer redevable deux ans plus tard, en 1952, sa célèbre composition silencieuse 4'33.
Avec 4'33, le silence, composé sonore parmi d'autres, perdait son statut d'entité virtuelle pour accéder à l'existence singulière.”³

What architecture struggles to engage with is precisely what this story about Cage's piece reveals, namely the awareness of the transformation of noise into sound, the notion that space and architecture in general is not a mystical, quasi-religious experience around the void (as the famous and somewhat irritating texts on space written by Martin Heidegger seem to suggest) but that space and spaces are part of particular existences, transforming constantly as they encounter new relations. Spaces like the ones we are discussing tonight. Marginal milieux of design practices and lived situations have developed inside these singular interrelated existences.

While mainstream architecture (and I include in this category many architects who would not consider themselves as such—no need to mention names) constantly presents us with shiny design palaces, whether austere or Arte Povera-looking, minimal or exuberant, filled with apolitical, marketable objects, a large number of singular, less visible objects swim under them, and in the sewers of these palaces are the heroes of Terry Gillian's *Brazil* universes.

The decades from the 1950s to the 1970s celebrated in a multitude of ways a sense of renewed energy in design practices and presented a large palette of possibilities in terms of exercising our profession. It all seemed to happen as if the post-war time period had temporarily re-opened the worksites of modernity from the threshold of the 20th century, the ones that the wars had closed in the

meantime. Artistic complexity and political engagement were on the operating table during those years.

A few moments that I call missed opportunities could have provoked a significant shift in the histories of architecture. The first one is the Dream of Venus pavilion made by Salvador Dali for the New York World's Fair of 1939. The small building was named after (and is a sort of reproduction of) Botticelli's Venus. The pavilion presented a vision clearly opposite to what the World's Fair was all about: the World of Tomorrow. The Fair was the most representative moment of Norman Geddes and Raymond Loewy's streamlined vision of the world, progressive and forward-looking. The show opened its doors on the eve of the Second World War, and the presence of Dali's work at the Fair was a confrontation of dreams: a futurist and progressive consumerist dream attacked by the unformal, strange and grotesque total work of art of this small piece of architecture, or David vs. Goliath. After crossing the door between Venus' thighs, one penetrated an internal and fantastic universe of the subconscious, an erotic environment made of exotic kitsch, nudity, mermaids and human aquariums.

I consider this piece a prototype of a surrealist architecture that did not fully develop, although it will appear precisely in nightclub architecture and design of the 60s and 70s. What interests me the most in these spaces is that they address a complete and holistic experience, for the external perceptive body as well as for our internal sensitivity and emotional reactions. In both cases, the complexity of these experiences is voluntarily addressing a wide audience, with the nightclubs hosting a wide range of populations (marginal and not) along with Dali's will to merchandise his own art, translating it into everyday objects.

The second moment of this unofficial

history is the exhibition held in 1956 at the Whitechapel gallery entitled *This is Tomorrow*. With a title not far removed from the theme of the 1939 World's Fair mentioned above, the show exhibited a rather different 'tomorrow' than its American counterpart. The name of the exhibition speaks for itself. No promises here, showing the tomorrow of today (of 1956). The show is well known for its introduction of Pop art in the UK and Europe, even though this Pop art is markedly surrealist, with artists like Eduardo Palozzi and Richard Hamilton (a close friend of Duchamp's). The most notorious artists were those of the Independent Group, a creative group composed equally of artists, architects, and thinkers. The two artists mentioned above were in the good company of people like the fantastic Rayner Banham (founder of the group), and the thornier definable couple of Allison and Peter Smithson. Two pieces are relevant for my exposé tonight. The first is Richard Hamilton's complex collage with the incredible title of *Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing*. The second is the Smithsons' *House of the Future*, an interiority difficult to place in the architects' more general agenda, a mix of grotto architecture and pop attitude, creating maybe one of the most intense moments of interiority within the prolific career of the architects.

The third episode of this peripheral storyline is Ant Farm's *Inflatocookbook* manual.

Ant Farm, a group of architects much more appreciated and referenced by the art world than in the realm of architecture, worked as much on architectural projects as on media installations and sculptures between the mid-1960s and the end of the 1970s. One of the most well-known pieces is the 1970 Cadillac Ranch, a series of half-buried Cadillacs in the Texan desert of Amarillo. Ant Farm's output developed mainly along two working axes: inflatable architecture and media installations.
The *Inflatocookbook* is the synthesis of their inflatable architecture know-how and experiences, and it owes a considerable amount to the interior world of Buckminster Fuller and the research work carried out in Frei Otto's Institute for Lightweight Structures in Stuttgart. The latter's publications, under the name of IL, will become an inspiration for all adepts of biomorphic structures. The manual is presented as a ready-to-use, rather chaotic, catalogue based on montage editing techniques. Inflatables are considered environmentally-friendly structures in their lightness and ephemerality, strongly suggesting an ideal nomadic society that does not leave heavy and irreversible traces of their settlement. The catalogue extends as a continuity of the essential *Whole Earth Catalogue* that founded the counter-culture attitude of the 1970s (the first *WEC* was published in 1968). Another aspect of the inflated interior is the amplification and alteration of bodily sensations and emotions. Inhabiting an inflated space is a psychotropic experience.

The fourth and final episode for the time being is *Architecture without Architects* by Bernard Rudofsky, another exhibition that defined its time and introduced the notion of vernacular architecture.

Here is a quote from this publication:

> "Architectural history, as written and taught in the Western world, has never been concerned with more than a few select cultures. In terms of space it comprises but a small part of the globe [...] or little more than was known in the second century A.D. [...] Although the dismissal of the early stages can be explained, though not excused, by the scarcity of architectural monuments, the discriminative approach of the historian is mostly due to his parochialism. Besides, architectural history as we know it is equally biased on the social plane. It amounts to little more than a who's who

of architects who commemorated power and wealth; an anthology of buildings of, by, and for the privileged—the houses of true and false gods, of merchant princes and princes of the blood—with never a word about the houses of lesser people.”⁴⁴

The famous and immensely popular catalogue will put vernacular architecture at the top of the pile by questioning modernism and considering non-Occidental and 'non-pedigreed' architecture part of our inhabited world culture. The MOMA exhibition was eminently visual and presented a display of a series of visually complex superimpositions, creating conditions enabling the visitor to spatially inhabit the image environment. Rudofsky's creativity with the display came close to that of Carlo Scarpa's approach to exhibition design, presenting a political discourse as well, as the show was an immersive and easy way to showcase non-official or in this case literally peripheral architectures of the world. The spatialisation of the images allowed him to embrace the contemporary mantra of the time, "the medium is the message", playing with the powerful and subliminal impact of the object-images. There is no doubt that the rather enormous popular success of the exhibition owes a great deal to the interior power of the spatial display.

I will now conclude this first series of micro chapters in a potentially longer one that could constitute a whole new approach to architecture history, made of storylines travelling through non-hierarchical centralities and peripheries. A history to be reviewed in another great Howard Zinn-type *A People's History of the United States. A People's History of Architecture*, where the time travelling would be featured and narrated by multi-gendered protagonists of minority cultures. A history by and for the eyes and ears of barbarians and savages, starring noise before silence, playing and listening to

the sounds of our interconnected interior and exterior bodily organs, a history for altered consciences, presenting asperities and non-alignments, and narrating and inhabiting the lives of others and otherness of which we are all part.

Daniel Zamarbide is the director of the architectural firm BUREAU with offices in Geneva and Lisbon. Through the years, Zamarbide has developed a particular interest in the protean aspects of his discipline, such that his work and research are fuelled as well by other fields such as philosophy, applied and visual arts and film. He is regularly invited as a guest lecturer and juror by international architectural schools and cultural institutions to present and discuss his work and research. Since 2003 his interest in education has led him to become a professor at HEAD—Genève (Geneva University of Art and Design) as well as a guest professor and co-director of ALICE laboratory's year one at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).

<footnote n="1">1. Adolf Loos, *Ornament and Crime* (London: Penguin Books, 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Claude Levi Strauss, *Race et Histoire*, Collection Folio Essais no. 58 (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Jean-Pierre Criqui, "Le Monde selon Christian Marclay", in Jean-Pierre Criqui (ed.), *Replay Marclay* (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Bernard Rudofsky, *Architecture without Architects: An Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture* (New York: The Museum of Modern Art; distributed by Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1964).</footnote>
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Photos: © Dylan Perrenoud

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F O O D

Think about a meal. Not just any meal, since language has a word for it: dinner. At its mention, we are transported into the memory of a nightly event, a special and almost ceremonial and ritualised performance.

The night is double in nature: sleep and dreams, nightmares and death, the end of one day and the promise of a new dawn. It can be a moment of solitude, peaceful or anxious, or an opportunity to come together. The banquet embodies a moment when people gather around a meal. The term comes from the Italian *banchetto*, feast, which is derived from *banco*, bench, thus representing a space where benches are arranged around tables to eat and converse.

The event focused on the creation of a nocturnal banquet. Not just any *banchetto*, as the students sought to explore dinner in a country where some latitudes are plunged into darkness for many months and which could arbitrarily be described as the champion of nocturnal comfort food: Russia. After a careful study of the rituals involved in Russian meals, they designed and built an installation that allowed them to make toasts, including the entire gigantic and unique dinner table and benches, all using deliberately burnt wood boards. They also produced the tableware with the support of experienced ceramists.

Similarly to the other nights, this one was a lived (eat-en and imbibed) as much as a learning experience. After Julien Zanetta's lecture, in which he shared the funny and mundane tale of an 18th-century character, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, the audience was whisked away for a Russian meal organised by the Domingo Collective. This was another opportunity to randomly explore rituals and customs that engage our social relations at night in a common and shared experience. As night fell, the space faded away, and only the table and the guests could be seen. Boundaries receded into the darkness, giving way to nocturnal intimacy, which thickened and became a place for conversations and silence shared among guests around the table.

Dinner: Domingo Collective

Students: Tania Bersier, Rafael, Donoso, Noémi Dux, Shanna Lancian, Clora Losey

HEAD - Genève Interior Architecture Department

Photos: © Jerlyn Heinzen

A
BY

PRESENTATION
JULIEN ZANETTA
f'ar Lausanne, 29.05.2019

As a patron saint of contemporary foodies, Grimod de la Reynière, prominent figure of Parisian gastronomy in the 18th century, has been somewhat neglected. In this regard,

there are two quite complicated concepts to be linked, namely the concept of night on the one hand, and the concept of food on the other. In order to do so and to 'flatten' a conceptual terrain that can be quite dense, I refer to the historian Alain Cabantous, who asked this question quite appropriately: "Is a history of the night possible?"
According to him, this would be quite difficult, because, as you may have experienced, the concept of night is particularly elusive, and it changes as time goes by. Cabantous tries to define it in terms of time, whether it be clock time or religious time (around Ave Maria, or Vespers), which are concrete time markers, or according to astral time (before or after sunrise or sunset) or daily time (before dinner or after dinner).

In fact, the night space is multifaceted, and, as Cabantous states, though others have noted it as well, it is subject to control. The 18th century is a particular moment in time, because it is a time when night lighting is increasingly present, due in part to the myth, since invalidated, that crime will be less prevalent if the streets are well-lit. And the better we can see, the better we can catch, the better we can grasp, the better we can see what is hidden. But it turns out that this is not true. As a series of studies has shown, there are as many murders during the day as at night, and in the 18th century, as in the 16th or 17th, this is a kind of constant idea. In this case, historians of the night came up against the following problem: political will wanted to make day prevail over night. Gas lighting arrived, night receded, and obviously it retreated to the provinces. In terms of the political will to control the citizenry, there was also a noticeable change. In the parallel between night and food that I will try to build, why does the concept of taste become something completely different? Taste is a notion that becomes, at that moment, completely new and reinvested, whereby it is no longer simply taste as a matter of meaning, but it becomes meaning with the faculty of aesthetic judgment.

It all goes back a long way, to Plato's *Gorgias* dialogue, where Socrates determines that taste is not an art, but a skill. Skill is something quite tangible, but it does not give the spectator, or

those who take part in the meal, the opportunity to appreciate the latter as a work of art. The cook is denied the right to be called an artist. However, this will change at this very moment. Taste in the 18th century is at the very core of Locke, Hume or Condillac's sensualism. Indeed, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, based on empiricism—which is also to say, a concrete test of our faculties—take up Aristotle's formula that “nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses”¹. Therefore, in order for us to experience something, we must know it; we must recognise it. Thus, experiencing through the senses is the foundation of knowledge. Obviously, painting is important, sculpture is important, experiencing with all the senses is important, but taste is somewhat left out, although some people come close to it, are moving towards it, trying to integrate our fifth sense, which is often relegated along with the sense of smell to something 'insignificant', to make it possible to experiment with this sense and especially to find ways to collaborate, thus linking the sense of sight to that of taste. You have understood that I am moving gradually towards a way of cooking that is as beautiful as it is flavourful. And this notion of presenting a dish aesthetically such that it looks as beautiful as it tastes has a philosophical substratum; yet, philosophers did not consider cooks to be artists.

Except for Grimod de la Reynière, who will give the profession a title and ask of it something more, anticipating in the experience of eating or dining something that will leap to the fore in the 20th century, and even more so subsequently, which is performance. So, this nocturnal meal that we are sharing tonight, staged, has a theatrical depth. With art reigning supreme in the 17th century, and the theatre, we are going to move quickly from the theatre scene to the supper, the cena, the meal, and this transition to the dinner or the meal as a theatrical piece will be frequently evoked. As the saying goes: “The dining room

<figure><img src="image_181.png" /><figcaption>1. Scene from Barry Lyndon</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_182.png" /><figcaption>2. An 18th century dinner</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_183.png" /><figcaption>3. Engraving depicting Grimod from the side</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_184.png" /><figcaption>4. Louis-Léopold Boilly, *Alexandre-Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière*, 1813, oil on canvas, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, France</figcaption></figure>