Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
considerable state of disrepair. Located at the top of a steep hill on the
outskirts of the city (in the traditionally dominant position of the aristocracy),
the complex was isolated from the city centre and populated by
single parents, students, immigrants and old age pensioners. The kindergarten
on the roof was fabricated entirely in concrete and therefore
unpopular, while Le Corbusier’s plans to have a fl oor of the Unité dedicated
to shops was never realised. Since 1983, half of the building had been
empty and boarded up, leaving entire ‘streets’ of apartments empty and
uninhabited, separated from the rest of the building by plastic sheeting.
Müller suggested to Aupetitallot that it might be possible to hold an exhibition
in these apartments. Each one could be taken over by an artist as the
site for an installation, on the model of ‘Chambres d’Amis’, but now using
the uninhabited spaces of this aesthetically and ideologically loaded
modernist dinosaur.
The exhibition took four years to be realised; in order to pave the way
for the project, three newsletters were designed by Müller and circulated
from November 1992 onwards. In the fi nal exhibition, forty European and
US artists, architects and designers were invited to work in situ; they
assumed the role of inhabitants, producing work for twenty- nine empty
apartments within what one critic called a ‘living monument to an unfulfi
lled utopian pragmatics, a grand, if fl awed, integration of art, architecture,
design, national culture, economics, politics, and the social’. 10 This insistence
led to some diffi cult experiences for the artists: Mark Dion, for
example, recalls being left alone in the apartment over a weekend, unable
to speak French, and feeling desperate. 11 A similar feeling affl icted Renée
Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, Firminy, begun 1965
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