For this second project of Defacement, we were asked to create a body of work that documents, interprets or re enacts an instance or a material form of physical erasure in response to a specific Parisian urban scape or social dynamic. I chose the urban cultural center that is the Cent Quatre. Located in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, this industrial building is a public space of infinite art,culture and innovation.

People come here for art exhibitions, art residencies, start-up residencies, but mostly to rehearse performing arts such as theatre or contemporary dance. While it is
today place of free expression and movement, it certainly holds a different history.
In 1874, it was inaugurated, and for 120 years house state funded funeral services.

It involved the preparation and transportation of the coffins, the side halls house ornament stores and workshops (carpentry,tapestry,painting and upholstery). During WWII, the Indochina war and the Algerian war were the only periods where it took care of dead bodies as it received the remains of repatriated soldiers. In the Cent Quatre’s case, a whole defacement occured from the past into the present. I intend to showcase it through a juxtaposition of stills, films and sound. The stills will show- case the industrial architecture that mimicked the large exhibition halls and train stations of the 19th century. It’s constructed around a cast-iron frame using glass and brick. The building’s aesthetic is our main link from past to present, it is the space where everything is and has been experienced. Those stills will be juxtaposed with sounds of historical recordings and stereo that reflect those you would hear when it was a funeral service: hooves of horses on the pavement, leather and wooden heels stepping down stairs, christian religious chants, people in mourning waiting to be attended in “cave”like stereo, woodwork from carpentries…The sound will work as an analogy and retracing of the past. Finally we will have the film, which will be footage of a dancer in movement in the space, which is a representation of what the defacement of the Cent Quatre has led to today: from detachment and death to life, expression and movement.