THE LAND WAS ALREADY OCCUPIED (THE FUTURE)

For the Ateliers de Rennes 2012, and in keeping with the spirit of Les Prairies, Marie Voignier has put herself in a real-life situation, that of looking at a building plot and investigating the different ways of approaching construction on it. A surveyor, a town-planner and a landscape architect take it in turns to express their vision and to explain their activity, and in doing so give the lie to the perception of the plot as a mere expanse of terrain. For this video Marie Voignier drew inspiration from the television documentaries about architecture that Eric Rohmer made with Jean-Paul Pigeat in the 1970s. These films, incidentally, were an essential source for this curator in creating the artistic project of Les Prairies. Forty years on, there has been a noticeable change in attitudes towards unbuilt-on land, whether it is meadow, field or wasteland. One is unlikely now to see someone stand in front of a huge field and say, as one of the architects in the Rohmer film does, “Look, there, there is nothing”. The beholder can reappraise his or her perception of built reality. (Source: Anne Bonnin)