A NEVER-ENDING STONE – Une pierre sans fin
Concrete performance with Emmanuel Sala (dance) with help of Isabelle Brunaud (choregraphy), maycec (live sound of her piece Quadraria), Anaïs Aria Sala and myself (concrete making), two sessions of 15 min, 2024.
A standardised material on a global scale, concrete is now widely criticised for its harmful ecological impact. Its natural components are not harmful in themselves, but its overuse has made it a veritable scourge. It was an idealised post-war tool, with the vision of rehousing people quickly and cheaply, without questioning its lifespan. It also benefited the worst authoritarian regimes, in the creation of inordinate narcissistic constructions. Today, we are paying the cost of its deterioration, its impact on health when it is destroyed (respiratory disease), and its impossible recycling.
During my residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris, I looked at François Coignet, a little-known French concrete pioneer who was also a Fourrierist (19th-century social utopian). As early as 1853, he built his first house in reinforced concrete, which was later followed by France’s first social housing called “La Ruche” in St Denis (Paris surburbs), built by his son in 1894. Issues of health and social progress were very important to Coignet, who hoped to create a “stone paste” that would enable him to democratise architecture, “a never-ending stone “. His wife, Clarisse Coignet, was also a great progressive, a teacher close to Jules Ferry who initiated the creation of secular, free and compulsory schooling in France.
As part of the performance, I invited one of his current descendants, Emmanuel Sala, to interpret his relationship with the humanisation of architecture through dance. A haemophiliac from birth, he underwent several knee operations until the day he was fitted with a surgical cement prosthesis, supposedly temporary. This large piece of concrete has lived in his body for 25 years.
In parallel with Emmanuel’s dance, Anaïs Aria Sala, also a descendant of Coignet, and I experimented with concrete ‘made in Cité des Arts’, based on a recipe that was as vernacular as possible, using elements found on site. We tried to shape the cement prosthesis of the dancer’s knee from his only image, an X-ray. Inspired by Coignet’s many experimental recipes, we tried to reproduce the black tint that characterised his original concrete, known as “mâchefer”.
© photos of the performance by steeve bauras
Vernacular concrete
Series of four objects made of vernacular concrete from elements collected on the site of the Cité des Arts and its immediate surroundings, variable dimensions (Ø from 17.5 to 22 cm), 2024.
The aim of this project is to offer an ironic response to the words of the theoretician Anselm Jappe: ‘Concrete has killed vernacular architecture’.