-- Artist statement
“Entre le Béton” is a documentary project of the Arrondissement of Créteil (part of the province of 94). The first thing that attracted me was the architectural forms. As a Parisian suburb, the region of Créteil is one of the sites of implementation of the government project of post-war construction, the concrete buildings from the 1950s to the 1970s are everywhere.
As a cheap building material, "Béton-brut" has been widely used to solve the problem of the post-war housing shortage. Its' rough, simple and unpretentious characteristics are revealed to the fullest. These buildings look like a new type of rock, or mountains and forests, and the communities they form are isolated, just like nature reserves.
At that time, the architects were somehow influenced by progressivism and by certain socializing tendencies, so the architecture had to satisfy the scientific and pragmatic objectivity, and carry out their paranoid sincerity——All the structures must not be covered and the materials used are neither retained nor decorated.
The idea of a perfect living environment comes from the equality of sharing and cooperation: everyone can achieve hard work. With the end of the war, people's heart became the abandoned drylands, after bathing in the rain of those government project which intended to rebuild the beautiful life, they've moved in the cement hills on the edge of the city. However, a Sisyphean loop appeared. Even the roof garden, which symbolized the spiritual world, cannot change the reality: the inconvenience caused by the limited housing environment and intricate structure is almost unsolvable. The low employment rate and increased crime have made some parts of the suburbs notorious.
Today, these monumental buildings are full of dystopian visions. The wave has passed, and when we have eliminated all historical influences, the architect's aesthetics have been truly recognized and appreciated, "Style takes precedence over content. ” as Sontag said.
So, back to the feeling that the landscape of the suburb has given me——An intimate sense of obsolescence. Base on that, I found my key-word for my motif and my questions——Saudade, a Portuguese word that expresses a complex feeling of melancholy, nostalgia, and longing, for the absence of something or someone that one loves, for land or time of no return. And my 'Saudade' is also built on the Déjà-vu for the places never really existed in my past, a fictional nostalgia.
The suburb is a concentrated representation of public housing, hypermarkets, factories, gas stations, railways, and highways. These standard facilities made the suburb has a specific, modular look, and it is universal in the world. All the metropolitans have their own outskirts, and there we can always find similar buildings, sympathy exists in the concrete. Just as we plant the same seeds around the world, they are turning into the same suburbs and satellite towns，only the residents are different.
So when I smelled the scent of a bookstore in my childhood memories at the mall in Créteil or the aroma of baking pizza in front of Ivry Town Hall Square makes me feel like I am in the market of my hometown. The nostalgia caused by the sympathy may be just an illusion of the combination of concrete, metal, detergent, wheat, and firewood in a particular season. This feeling has driven me to find more connections with this land.
Like Hegel's thought——To find the self in the other, all the spiritual hometowns are the answer to childhood.
Tang Nanjing 汤南婧 was born in 1990 in Tianjin, China. Lives and works currently in Paris, France. Her work focuses on urban landscapes and finding commonalities between different regions. Her last photography series "Entre le Béton" was filmed in the department 94 (inner-suburban of Grand Paris), where she was deeply fascinated by the architectural form and space atmosphere, leading her to explore her own questions. The form of the suburbs is universal in the world, and the corresponding living structure of the residents are also similar. Even if in different countries, the suburbs are like waves in the ocean, they are coming from the same source and running into the same end.
