In Brian Eno’s song “I’ll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoe)”, the title of which can be translated into French as “Je cours vers toi (lacer tes chaussures)“, a carefree voice settles over a canvas of synthesizers, snare drum and the blended strings of guitar and bass. It talks about spending its days looking out of the window. It also talks about wandering and the changing seasons. What part of all this is audible, what other part mingles with the sound of the engine as Nelly Monnier and Eric Tabuchi drive along the country roads on a grey day? I don’t know. But at least we know where the title of their exhibition comes from.
It’s true that, at first glance, this narrative doesn’t sound very “architectural“.
The album Another Green World, which contains the track, presents itself as a landscape album, moving between the renunciation of pop accents and the ambience of Eno’s work. In this infra-architecture of sound textures, we navigate between turbulent assurance and quiet fragility. And there’s no guarantee that any of it can be reproduced, even with a musical score in hand.
But if Nelly Monnier and Eric Tabuchi are to be believed, the buildings that shape the landscape of our “natural regions“ are no strangers to this dynamic. How many cottages and sheds also feature this juxtaposition of materials? How many of them bear witness to this curious impetus that superimposes rubble and brick, braids metal and wood, relying on empirical knowledge handed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation?
The Atlas des Régions Naturelles (ARN) is the fruit of a particular attention to this form of modesty. It is also the result of a pronounced taste for adventure, exploration and even exoticism. What we are being offered is a guide to the vernacular, a step aside so that we can move fearlessly off the beaten track of mainline France, even if it means upsetting the knowledge we thought we had of our environment.
On the other side of the garden gate described by Brian Eno in his song, what will we discover? Self-builds, rushed commercial initiatives, bricklayers’ houses... Here’s an enterprising family who’ve blocked up a window, there a friend who’s helped on a whim to build an extension that we haven’t yet found the time to plaster.
From these edges, you can see art brut. We can also observe a whole territory that is less rooted than one might think in calibrated aesthetics or folklore. France in the ARN is unified by a network of practices, the most important of which has long been “do-it-yourself“. But even this activity is now threatened by standardization, photography collects traces of it, the need for it, and calling by doing so into question learned architecture.
The exhibition Je cours vers toi pour lacer tes chaussures stands as an absolute eulogy to tinkering, patching and repairing, against all post-modern reconstructions. It conveys the ultimate ecological message for architecture, now that we know that most of the greenhouse gases emitted by a building during its lifetime are emitted at the time of construction. So there is virtue in accepting imperfection. And as Nelly Monnier and Eric Tabuchi sometimes say, “abundance of means is detrimental”.
If money were abundant, none of what they show would be visible. Everyone would no doubt have bought their own little place on the well-trodden paths of contemporary aesthetics. For this reason, their exhibitions do not feature scenography, but rather functional, modular installations.
In their thematic pavilions, the image market takes on a new twist. It’s a four-season market, where you have to pass through the curtains and drapes and explore the stalls. And don’t touch the stickers, which hold up part of the structure. And don’t wait too long to soon it will all be moved again, packed away in a van to be reassembled elsewhere—differently, no doubt, but hopefully without too much breakage. In the meantime, the artist-craftsmen will have continued their harvesting.
As for Brian Eno, paradoxically he has produced music that is surprisingly free of dissonance. His bricolages, adventurous as they are, rarely deviate from the chromatic norm: a balance has been struck between the perils of plastic exploration and dialogue with the most diverse of audiences. And perhaps that’s the message encrypted in the atlas: however convoluted it may be, the world presented is habitable, shareable, and in fact already ours. So it’s up to us to go deeper into it—once we’ve laced up our shoes.