UNE MAIVAISE ÉDUCATION : a project on Épinay-Sur-Seine

Photos : Benoît GRIMALT

I should not be here. This is where we will start. If we collect all pertinent information about my life and arrange it in any haphazard order, weigh the consequences and hopes, no one with any hint of logic or commonsense could say with true clarity that I should be here. So given this information, we can continue.

I am in France. I have been living here for about a year. I live, in what I would call, the interstice. This for the most part is comprised of such physical domains as attics, couches, nooks, crannies, occasionally hallways, and seldom closets. I have been educating myself on the basic subject of «How To Be an American».

Perhaps this may seem strange, to be in the land where freedom toast is called «pain perdu» and freedom fries are called «frites», and find out more about being an American than I knew before I left.

America, as I have come to find, out is not only the United States, but a super continent consisting of 35 separate countries, 28.4% of the land surface area, and 14% of the human population of Earth. So, when I speak of myself as an American, I speak of this New World. When I speak of the country where I was born and lived for 32 years, I prefer to use the terms United Stater, Stater and Statese. In French, I am an «États-unien».

Being a Stater, I quickly realised certain similarities that my newly adopted home shared with my old home: A slant towards liberalism (in the classic sense where public services are privatised) and the influx of advertising and ideas from the United States : 4×4s on tiny cobblestone streets, giant buildings that have no human scale and destroy «the urban fabric», and a growing antipathy in the realm of politics.

The France of today is built on the traditions of the past and also the imported dynamism of United Statese culture. The grand economic imperialist has indeed won a good deal of ground on this side of the pond. France is the number two per capita market for Mickey D’s in the world. Apple, coke, KFC, the Gap, and other old friends from the States are here. The country of black and white photos of honkeys sipping wine and kissing in the streets is now today a diverse buzzing population from every corner of the world. It is in this environment that I fell in love, with a town : Épinay-Sur-Seine.

Épinay-Sur-Seine is a city of forty-seven thousand habitants, and it is a typical town of the Parisian banlieue (too dense to really be considered suburbs in the classic Stater sense). It is not a beautiful town. The only thing strikingly French is the conglomeration of tall post war housing blocks. These were built upon the idea of the early 20th century architect Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin. A scheme of urban design which separates pedestrian and auto routes, and creates the «tower in a field» city skyline aesthetic. However, I found myself attracted to this town, because it is anything but pretentious, as we see in the planning and execution of Bordeaux and many other French cities. Grand urban gestures, scenes, giant sculptures… after a while it is as if someone were yelling in paisley. Épinay-Sur-Seine is a town of modesty, and so my housemates and most of the population live here, but don’t actually know the city, instead they go to Paris to work, play, and even exercise !

The town interests me because it is a place without a visible history, anonymous in fact. I decided that I wanted to look at the city with different eyes, write an exposé on the town and print a series of postcards. In fact, I wanted to create a tourist friendly town. so I began my project : ÉPINAY-SUR-SEINE : destination touristique.

I started collecting information the old fashioned way, by walking. I began to take my friends on walks around the town, I walked alone through the town. From Paris, I took the last metro to the nearest town and walked the five plus kilometers to Épinay. I constructed a rather thorough mental geography of the town filled with high rise apartment buildings, train stations, commercial centres, alleys, historic homes in stone and brick, abandoned film processing factories, shacks of homeless next to the Seine (a river made popular due to its route through Paris), and a field of tent shacks.

I enlisted my friend and photographer Benoît Grimault to document the fabulous and mundane facets of the town, I started to read the local city and regional magazines, and visit the local library and the mayor’s office to collect the secret history of the town, and begin to suture some of the wounds of bad urbanism with the truth of the past and the industrial beauty of the present.

Épinay-Sur-Seine is the, well, Hollywood, of France, but more in a hidden factory of film development, sound stages, behind the scenes kind of way. There is no walk of stars, no celebrity neighborhood, the only evidence is a little monument in front of the town hall with the names of certain films made here since 1907. The city is celebrating 100 years of the cinema industry. My education is not ideal, nor is my teaching, but it is in the spirit of decentralised human based education that I give tours of the town and share the observations and hidden corners of my «plain jane» ville.

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