A la Folie – encore

Alongside the dislodged doorway, a city wasteland has been temporarily tamed into a small shared garden. With little greenery in this most mineral of environments, the city council handed over the management of the space to a collective who have drawn and dug a series of micro-gardens.

The volunteers have had two limitations placed on them. Firstly, no running water will be provided, meaning that rain water has needed to be salvaged, and a predominance of plants that flourish in dry conditions. Secondly, the garden will have a short life span, providing just a brief blaze of green before the planned social housing digs its foundations down into the beds.

No-one is here when I pass, and little is here to keep people in the garden beyond two benches and the promise of calm and quiet. Dominating the garden are the high walls of neighbouring structures, and on one of these the imprint of what must have stood here before. The scribbled lines of a house, the shape of which could easily have come from a child’s imagination.

Dust back to dust. New walls will rise, new stories will be created, but other ephemeral traces of the past will be erased from our shared landscape.

A la Folie

At the end of the cobbled passageway stands an old stone gateway and a locked wooden door. Forever closed now, it is no longer even sure where it is positioned nor what it once provided access to. The confusion can be read on the walls where two separate street numbers are given. Are we at number 32 here or number 161 bis? It really doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

This proud doorway was in fact picked up and moved here in 1972. On the other side now sit cryptoforests and lonely patches of neutered garden, sterile borders that exist to be seen not touched. An imposing gateway built to inspire respect and apprehension has now been absorbed into the disorderly fabric of a city that crept right up to and under the door’s foundations.

It stands in the territory of the Folie-Regnault, a bridge to a past of country houses and isolated prisons commemorated in the names of streets, passages and a small community garden. Semi-industrialised in the 19th and 20th centuries, the network of passages and courtyards here are still home to brick-faced printshops and iron-framed automobile workshops, but slowly they are being scrubbed and polished into acceptable office space for professionals in the digital world.

Displaced and today without purpose, this doorway once provided access to the Maison Belhomme, a mansion built in 1724 and used as an asylum for the mentally handicapped. Its owner, Jacques Belhomme, would make his fortune during the revolution by providing additional space for the city’s aristocracy who could no longer be accommodated in the overflowing prisons of Paris. Some say they paid him to pretend that they were mad (and therefore incapable of being against the revolution..)

The house remains, hidden today on all four sides by vast 1970s housing blocks, and is still located somewhere behind this gateway. You can find it if you look carefully, but it will serve no purpose to knock on this door!

Christmas is Over

A walk along the city streets in the cold commencement of January brings many a sad sight. Propped up against posts, amongst the ruins of a smashed toilet or just lying prone on freezing paving tiles are the carcasses of a thousand banished Christmas trees.

January is a time to look forward and to make changes, and the throwing out of the tree is often the symbolic starting point of new resolutions. The trees left out on the streets will be picked up and incinerated, but don't we all deserve a chance at a second life? My own tree is exhausted and has shed many of its needles, but this week I'll be taking it to the local park where it will later shredded and used as mulch in city gardens. A tree is surely best left alive and growing, but at least this will be a life recycled.

Bonnes Fêtes

Weather and transport technology permitting, I will soon be heading out of Paris for 10 days, and also away from all means of digital communication. Thanks to everyone who pops by here from time to time, and I wish you all bonnes fêtes. I'll be back posting in the new year, and I hope I may even meet a few more people as I have plans to organise one or two events in 2011...

Meanwhile, if you are in Paris over the holiday period, I've prepared a short list of suggestions for things to do on the Paris Weekends blog. Similar lists can also be found on Girls Guide to Paris and Vingt Paris.

This photo belongs to the collective memory of our district

Following on from my post on Patrice de Moncan's Paris Avant/Après book comparing Charles Marville's photos of Paris with pictures taken today, I was interested to come across a similar project organised by 'Belleville mon amour', an association set up to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the 20th arrondissement.

Rather than create a book and compare photos, the group have placed large-scale historical photos at key points around the arrondissement, enabling passers by to make instant comparisons themselves. Beneath the photo is a simple message;

"Cette photographie appartient à la mémoire collective de notre quartier. Merci d'en prendre soin" (This photo belongs to the collective memory of our district. Please take care of it).

It is fascinating to think of a photograph as belonging to the particular area in which it was taken. Marville was hired to document the changing city of Paris, but did he think how people would interact with his photos in the centuries to come? He was operating at a time when the technology was in its infancy, but must have been aware of its potential. Thousands of years of history before him had been words, paint, stone, dust. Now the city could be frozen and imprinted into our collective memories.