pavillonnaire.zone
I am an architect and photographer based in Paris. I grew up in the suburbs of Bordeaux. My first experience of the city and architecture was playing soccer against my neighbour's garage door. This attraction for spontaneous uses and hijacking practices is reflected in my works.
After graduating from ENSAPBx with a research mention, I quickly moved into the field of suburbs and “pavillonnaire” as a changing context to be repaired, rehabilitated, observed and learnt from. My work at this purpose has taken diverse forms, such as publications, ongoing research, public talks and architecture projects.
I am fully engaged in this field through cooperations with small, independent architectural structures. I am currently involved in a renovation project on an occupied site of a large complex of houses with social issues in a 1980s neighbourhood of Cergy.
I have also been published in the first issue of Exercice for a photographic documentation of hijacking practices in a typical French “pavillonnaire” neighbourhood. And I was invited to participate in a Franco-Belgian seminar, led by a CNRS research group on suburban issues, where I presented my ongoing pavillonnaire.zone project.
In a way, "pavillonnaire" is the French version of the American suburbia. But, unlike its transatlantic cousin, it is an invisibalized territory about which we know too little, and whose culture is frequently stereotyped and dominated by an urban-gazed perspective. However, having grown up in one of those strange and confusing lands, I felt the urge to explore the diversity of "pavillonnaire" lore and question the particular cultural production it generates.
My proposal, pavillonnaire.zone, is a contributive and web-based map hosting an ongoing survey on cultural production forms in the diverse French suburbia (pavillonnaire). It combines my personal experiences with online co-curation, data analysis and cartographic approaches to highlight this overlooked territory and its specific qualities, and to co-create a new narrative for a new suburban care and common opportunities.
It began in 2020, in the continuity of my research in this field, with a double ambition. Firstly, I wanted to show and to map, for the first time, the French "pavillonnaire" figure using open data visualisation. Secondly, to breathe life into this map by spotting relevant examples of suburban stories or creations, going from architecture, to cinema or local initiatives, that reflect multiple visions from the inside. And that whole would create a diverse and unhierarchical mix of "pavillonnaire" gaze, with multiple access to get in.
And it did. A first version (V.01) is now live at www.pavillonnaire.zone. It is already open to contributions via a form and displays a first selection of entries. It is a stable infrastructure that can be expanded in many identified ways, such as: complexifying database navigation, opening the map and data to other EU countries, enabling takeover curation, providing support for collective exhibitions or workshops, using it as a mediation tool for suburban issues or as a database for editions or transversal research.