Marine Nicole Anne Antoinette Paul Declève
In Brussels today we can observe a proliferation of initiatives that reject the utilitarian framework which society, since industrialisation, has imposed upon the notion of work. Architects of their own lives, their adherents approach work as an existential value. They shift the classical boundaries between the time of labour and domestic reproduction, the time of imagination and creation of an irreplaceable and unique existence, and the time of public activity. They occupy new spaces and networks, transforming labour's relationship to the city and to inhabiting the city.The author has taken this phenomenon as the basis for an investigation conducted at the intersection where the cultures of town planning, of art history, and of anthropology meet. Bypassing classic definitions that reduce labour and employment to the functions of growth and the accumulation of capital, it tests the perception that this proliferation of initiatives is part of the tradition of urban craftsmanship. She will seek theoretical reference points in the work of authors such as F. Braudel, K. Polanyi, H. Arendt, W. Morris, I. Ilitch, K. Lynch, C. Alexander, and A. Corboz. Her question becomes: how do artisans and artisanal work spaces contribute to the production of the city as a place for living?Answering this question requires staking a position on writing the history carried by maps and city plans, which generally overlook the role of subordinates. This is what led the author to experiment with a lisuel method a cartographic reading allowing identification of the traces artisanal lives leave imprinted in maps' negative space. The experiment uses three maps drawn at key moments in the city's economic history: the noble city (c.1770), the new industrial Brussels (1910), and productive Brussels (2018). The method consists of reading in reverse the story the three maps convey by relying on a hypertextual corpus which makes it possible to adjust our perception of the scene and to spotlight a sample of the artisanal lives embedded in the maps' negative space.This investigation, which makes no claim to being exhaustive, reveals profiles of itinerant craftspeople open to cooperation and interculturality of different kinds and at different scales. It testifies to the complexity of the links between craft, industry, and art, revealing the lives of craftsmen dedicated to the enhancement and transformation of non-relocatable public goods such as territorial knowledge, public space, and the landscapes of movement.We see revealed an art of composing a singular spatiality, articulating the first location of the home, the second location of labour, and the third places of the exercise of public life. Materially, this produces the buildings that accommodate the activities and public spaces which they take part in structuring.The imprint of artisanal lifestyles in the fabrics of the city contributes incrementally to the production of space as well as to a collective process of structuring a singular urban sociability, which the author calls communality. The result of this experimental exercise is a prototype atlas showing the pattern language mobilised by artisans to write, in a vernacular mode, the space of this commonality.
EPFL2021
