eleven ravings ! | Paris 2oo3 /o4

As part of the 2oo3 “Lire en fête” reading festival, Agrafmobile proposed a literary rediscovery of Belleville, giving back to the walls, streets and inhabitants themselves what they had inspired in writers. This return to “original quotations” was a literary presentation of the public place. They loomed up throughout the neighbourhood, spread out in the form of posters, wrapping papers, table sets, and dazibaos, they could be read on shop blinds, and sampled in major newspapers, and they covered whole walls. This appropriation of the urban space was the quintessence and the rise-and-rise of the Chaumont experience. “onze délires !” (“eleven ravings !”) demanded to be rubbed against a huge change of scale, to become emboldened in the tentacular space of Paris. It was here that Malte Martin put his “low tension” strategy to the test… to manage to show these texts in the metropolitan jumble of signs. It was by radicalizing the features of Chaumont and choosing places which “let people speak” that the words of Belleville were heard. By using the Maison des Métallos and the square opposite it, Malte Martin created a nodal arrangement. The event was wound up by the slow scan and the whispers in the ear of the Prompters. The “rain of words” became heavier, rising up from nowhere, it spread in abundance, whirling in the blue of the day, snowy magic at night. Ephemeral, ecstatic, it brought shivers both in erudite readers and in the teenagers in the adjoining streets. Its extreme simplicity made the whole neighbourhood vibrate.