Impressions D'espaces 2024 (Space Impressions)

PROCESSUS is an art-science duo created with Jérémie Descamps, an urban planner and PhD in geography, whom I met during a residency at MOTOCO (an artistic production site in Mulhouse). Since 2023, we have been exploring together the mental representations of space and territory, as well as their collective memory, through dedicated research-creation protocols. It is notably through the prism of urban gates that we probe the notions of threshold, passage, and boundary—leading us to question those of territory, nation, and the human subdivision of space.

The aim of the research is to create a Book of Gates that reflects the multiple social configurations of cities through the gate as a device. Throughout history, gates have been endowed with aesthetic, symbolic, and geographical attributes that grant them a specific functionality, one that actively shapes the city. As such, we have focused on cities whose histories are closely linked to fortifications and gates, such as Paris, Rome, Chongqing, Kyoto, Berlin, and Mulhouse.

As part of our protocol, we traverse these locations to collect various data, inventory them, and distill them into an artistic form that conveys a synthetic vision of the imaginary of the gate. This form is composed of an aggregate of multiple elements and diverse media, following a grammar that can unfold both in public space and within an exhibition context.

On the art-science approach

A methodological note on the question of transdisciplinarity between art and science

How does our approach fit into a "transdisciplinary" research framework, or align with the concept of "research-creation" in the arts and humanities and social sciences? According to researcher Guillaume Logé, transdisciplinarity requires the confrontation of different disciplines, leading, in fusion, to an unprecedented form that is neither fully rooted in scientific disciplines nor entirely in artistic fields: it has evolved to become something else (Logé, 2019). In our project-based approach, it is precisely this other form that we aim to achieve, through the intertwining of our respective practices—giving equal importance to the research process itself and the form to which this process ultimately leads. For researchers Eric Dayre and David Gauthier, authors of L’art de chercher (2020), "research-creation" remains an open-ended form of inquiry, serving as a counterpoint to the hyper-specialization that characterizes all fields of research today. Urbanism, too, is affected by this trend. In this context, isn’t research-creation a new way to hybridize a research discipline or a project practice currently heavily constrained by insistent demands for norms and rationality? These norms, acronyms, and urban metrics have in fact ended up overshadowing an essential element of the city: the lived experience, the sensible, and by extension their representations—vital components of the city as a living organism rather than one frozen by sterile plans or obscure acronyms conceived from above (the notorious logotechnique already criticized by philosopher Françoise Choay).

While art-science research already exists between art and the so-called "hard sciences" (mathematics, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, biology...)—with artists having long drawn from the exactitudes of lab-based sciences to rework them through collected figures and materials—intersections between visual arts and the human and social sciences are rarer, or at least more recent, though just as fertile. They nonetheless require time to develop, and are subject to many uncertainties and potential pitfalls, as they exist within a less clearly defined framework. This is precisely how our collaboration began. Both in residence at Motoco, a facility hosting artist studios in Mulhouse, we started an informal conversation around philosophers we both admire—such as Pierre Sansot (for J. Descamps) and Walter Benjamin (for O. Moalla)—whose point of convergence may be their poetic evocation of places, thresholds, and visible or invisible borders that shape the city, and make us urban beings. O. Moalla was interested in the urban gate as a lens for interpreting the connections and ruptures that take place in the city. But it was the method of observing the urban gate—strolling and phantasmagoria inspired by Benjamin, a sort of immediate collection of impressions and projections emanating from the site—that truly resonated with J. Descamps. The artist—or rather, artists—according to him, genuinely have the power to shift rational and standardized approaches to space, to alter perspectives, and to renew the observation and understanding of space through visually and intimately innovative methods. This type of meeting around a shared theme of interest, where researchers and artists agree to explore a specific subject together, is what Dayre and Gauthier call the event-triggered spark.

Initially, the idea of a stroll

A sensitive stroll around the gates of cities, under the sustained fire of philosophy

Our research-creation analyzes space in both its urban characteristics and its mental dimensions, which call upon the subjective idea of a "memory of place," anchored in the collective unconscious. It uses W. Benjamin's Parisian experience as a two-stage protocol. First, an empirical observation phase, echoing the concept of the "flâneur" and the collection of impressions and images evoked by a given place. Then, a phase of "inventorying" and synthesizing these data as fragments of a collective "phantasmagoria." For W. Benjamin, these phantasmagorias act as a measure of what makes a "place": the more they take on a chimerical nature, the more they indicate the intensity of the dialogue between the space in question and those who pass through it.

"All the misery and deviance are contained in the train station district. Slot machines, drug dealers, prostitution, homeless people, and especially drug addicts lying on makeshift mattresses directly on the ground, sometimes two or three together, evoking as many shipwrecks, as many Rafts of the Medusa by Géricault."

O. Moalla, residency in Frankfurt am Main, Basis E.V & CEAAC, 2023 

The choice of urban city gates and the traces they leave behind as the subject of our experimentation can be explained by the material, temporal, and intangible character they project. The impact of gates on the evolution, experience, and perception of a city at different periods in history is undeniable. Rome was exalted by its entrances: the gate is employed in the city’s founding myth as a sure means to cross a triple boundary — political, religious, and landscape ( pomerium ), without breaking it (Dibié, 2012). Similarly, does not the Book of Foundations remind us, through the writings of Livy, how this mother of cities was constituted “from founding murder to founding murder,” of “multiplicities,” of “multitudes,” whose first chiefs were its liquid crowd, contained as best as possible by limits ? “How to occupy a space, how to hold it? A solid cannot invade an expanse, it remains local. (...) The crowd (is) fluid. (...) The multitude, liquid, crosses limits” (Serres, 1983, p. 242).

From there, we can consider gates, these places of absolute passage, as unique valves that sometimes contain, sometimes spread out, that famous liquid — unless it completely overflows. They concentrate continuous flows: entering, exiting, stagnating, trampling, prostrating, creating a wake that remains tangible through the roads they have traced. Gates are geographical and symbolic landmarks that have imprinted individual and collective memory at a given time. Thus, from the city’s geography, we postulate that this memory is also marked by the lived experience of these places. By analogy, we establish two mental maps representing the same space but employing different representational grammars: the geographical (topographical) space and the space of memory (“Loci et Imagines,” Yates, 1966).

The gate, as P. Sansot tells us in Poétique de la ville (1996), is also the place where the uncertainties of power and all its popular representations are expressed:

“The victor or the ambassador or the distinguished guest would present themselves at these gates, which were thrown wide open for them, and they would ascend the triumphal way — that of all the cheers, all the fanfares, all the decorations. An avenue thus had the sole mission of recognizing, in its splendor, the city’s victor. Days of celebration and days of death! People cheered there, but also executed and hanged the enemies of the regime. The banners, the decorations, and also the gallows, the corpses rotting in the sun! The refined faces of politicians, diplomats, great figures of this world, and also the mass of children, onlookers, ordinary people; the punctual, cautious gait of those who have lived there forever — and the somewhat dazed appearance of those who have conquered thirst, hunger, heat before arriving, and who in this oasis of fountains and coolness, are amazed not to raise any dust. A city like a house, to become a home, seems to demand them imperiously. When they do not exist, we lose the precious moments of entry and exit.” (pp. 123-124).

P. Sansot vividly conveys the dizzying dynamic of this type of place. If places could speak, none could claim to have hosted more individuals than urban gates. The philosopher adds that “without these solemn passages that are worth more than the reality they introduce us to, the city, in a way, disappears since we never have to cross the threshold that assures us we have just entered it. Gates also evoke the constant daydreams of the lock, the bolt, the key” (ibid).

Without gates, no cities, no imaginaries? The “urban without figures” would then, in this respect, be a very problematic tendency. The urban, in the lifestyles it assumes, indeed tends to supplant the city which has lost all notion of limits: including even in rural zones, the habits, technologies, rhythms that were once those of the city now inexorably impose themselves on all (Lussault, 2007). The question of urban gates, by their memorial and immaterial dimensions, by their mandate as a boundary or threshold, by their embodiment of the City and not the urban, appears to us here all the more fundamental as it acts as a potent spur against the shapeless expanse of contemporary cities.

On the ground, a two-step protocol

From W. Benjamin to the recording of an “in situ conversation” (step 1) ,

from conversation towards a potential work (step 2)

It is through flânerie that W. Benjamin is interested in place, and through this, the images of the city, urban imagery, the collective unconscious deposited in the city, that is to say, the images it reflects – “images of dreams.” This entire grammar relates to the images mobilized and produced by capitalism in the 19th century, or emanating from a conflict within the collective imagery – for example, between workers and the emerging societies like department stores. Following this experience of the flâneur, a set of images occurs that W. Benjamin eventually names, stepping out of his flâneur stance: that of phantasmagorias: we project an imaginary onto the form we look at, and flânerie is the state where this capacity for projection becomes paroxysmal. “The flâneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city moves for the flâneur into phantasmagoria.” For W. Benjamin, the viewer is in a constant state of projection (op. cit., pp. 60-77). The key interpretative tool he uses to analyze his own flâneur experience is therefore, by transposition, that of phantasmagoria (the Magic Lantern) and the process by which it occurs – illumination, glass, veil. What attracts us here is not so much the social critique he issues regarding 19th-century capitalism, but the analytical protocol of the images reflected back to him by space.

His approach finds an indirect resonance with the ars memoriae – a set of mnemonic principles and various techniques used to organize memory, improve recall, and aid in the combination and “invention” of ideas – and more specifically the method of the loci et imagines. The ars memoriae is an “art” in the Aristotelian sense of the term, a method or set of prescriptions that add order and discipline to the pragmatic and natural activities of human beings. It has existed as a recognized group of principles and techniques since the middle of the first millennium BCE. It was generally associated with training in rhetoric or logic, but variants of this art have been used in other contexts, especially in artistic, religious, and magical fields (Yates, op. cit.). The method of loci et imagines therefore consists in associating information with specific places, playing with the cognitive capacity to remember impressive scenes. Ultimately, we seek to gather the images that places reflect back to us of what we have projected onto them, like a constant cognitive back-and-forth from us to the place, and from the place to us.

Through engaging various audiences — local residents, tourists, experts, researchers, visual artists — we aim first to create, around a simple conversation, an inventory entirely composed of images of city gates, a “sound photo-witness” of their history and representations. An in situ recording as raw material for a flowing, almost proprioceptive conversation mixing sensitive impressions, sensory inputs, urban analyses, sound recordings, interviews, readings of excerpts from theoretical works and novels, conferences in and around the public space of the gates. This sound “materializes” in a way the spirit of the gate in question, embodying its mental landscape. Above all, it is the places traversed that shape the volume of this sound form, itself then able to dictate others. These will revolve around various productions, simultaneously performative, installation, video, writing… (in a non-cumulative and non-exclusive manner), based on elements gathered in the urban space.

We understand this work as an open process in relation with the inhabitants: from gathering the first field elements to producing one or more works, different audiences are invited to intervene on site. Raw and semi-raw empirical data, as well as the various artistic and/or scientific treatments applied, are posted online on a dedicated page as materials for research-creation, accessible to all. Because it is about knowing the research in progress and not only the “finished product.”

Pilot City Mulhouse, Gate of the Mirror 

A first field experiment to “validate” our protocol 

In Mulhouse, our city of residence, we chose to focus on the Porte du Miroir, one of the gates encircling the historic heart of the city. This choice is partly directly induced by the “imagery” evoked in us by its toponym (the so-called Mirror gate), but also by O. Moalla’s past experience within this neighborhood, which he knows well. Our stroll first led us to record a conversation, then to identify a building as an object for interpreting our own representations.

Step 1: “Flânerie”, conversation, PROCESS, 2024  

Our stroll lasts about three hours and takes us from the Nessel Tower to the Porte du Miroir, from the Manège district to the former Foundry. We exchange throughout the journey, which is done on foot. This walk will result in an edited recording of about forty minutes, reflecting our discussion and impressions.

"Impressions d'Espaces: Porte du Miroir, Flâneries", recording and sound editing,

Mulhouse (Fr), 2024, PROCESS (Moalla & Descamps).

During our flânerie, we realized that one of the buildings in the Porte du Miroir neighborhood attracted both of us more specifically, a large housing complex that O. Moalla once called “Le Bateau”: an architectural project from the 1990s in a neo-Corbusian style with strange and amusing features. Formally intriguing and amusing for J. Descamps because of its monumental aspect, and personally significant for O. Moalla, since it was there he spent his free time as a young man with the neighborhood’s residents.

Step 2 : « L’Occupation du Sol », vidéo-archive, 15′, PROCESSUS, 2024

"Ground Occupation"   is a 15-minute video (see below or at this  link ) made from archival footage that O. Moalla captured of the “Boat.” Instinctively, we identified a “typology of images” from the rushes. These arbitrary groupings, combining both forms and content, decompose and recompose, like fragmented parcels, the story these images seemed to initially want to tell.

Other transit cities, for other Gates

Little by little, build our “Book of Gates”

We hope that cities whose gates remain highly emblematic—places of passage as well as rupture—will become the anchor cities of this research-creation project, which is currently passing through Mulhouse and the Porte du Miroir, and will later venture to Berlin, Rome, Chongqing, Paris, and Kyoto… gradually shaping a “Book of Gates.”

In fact, for several of these cities, we have already begun our research—gathering information, sketching urban plans, writing texts, etc. Other urban or rural areas, in France or abroad, where the notions of limits and borders are particularly strong, are also being identified.