Common: architecture with the inhabitants

For a long time, building houses was a collective undertaking. People built them with their friends or colleagues, and in return, they helped them to get their own houses off the ground.
Although the industrial mode of production based on private property and household debt has almost wiped out such solidarity-based behaviors, many exceptions remain. They are most often based on communities of ideas or experiences around the act of building and take the form of social and cultural actions on shared space and its exploitation.
This joint exhibition brings together uses and experiences that bear witness to the deep roots of these practices in the communities that experiment with them. It reveals how they short-circuit the conventional production mechanisms of the city.
The demonstrative nature of some of these projects proves capable of constituting reproducible models, on scales and in contexts different from those for which they were initially designed. In these terms, the attractiveness of certain projects and their media restitution within a cultural event could be likened to modelling: a life-size experiment transformed into an exhibition object to say loud and clear what is possible.

From the available city to communities at work
It is in this perspective that Commun brings together elements from two exhibitions held in recent years around the theme of the shared city and communities that operate outside of standardized and commercial circuits and relationships: David Brown’s contribution to the Chicago Biennale and Christophe Hutin’s participation for France in the Venice Biennale in 2021 organized in the same year.
Despite the thematic proximity that unites the two approaches, each is distinguished by the singularity of the experiences it relates. Unprecedented experiences that have durably modified the lives of those who took part in them, and which only ask to serve as an example…