Fluctuat nec mergitur – it sways but does not sink, the ship in the coat of arms of the city of Paris. But what is Paris for us? The capital of the spirit? The epitome of freedom? La Ville Lumière? A woman to fall in love with?
And these are just four of the many stereotypes that obscure the view when thinking about this city. Not forgetting the haute cuisine and haute couture! All in all, the clichés form an avalanche of high pedestals. The city of Paris is a palimpsest of incredibly many more layers than the very best strudel bakers could ever conjure up. How do we get to the inside of the delicacy? Just like a strudel – by taking a hearty bite. Situationism assimilated the Parisian strudel by deliberately wandering around. Georg Stefan Troller did this as a flâneur and through his photos of ‘small, trivial, marginal things that will soon no longer exist’. What distinguishes us from situationism is that we allow our attention to be guided by a given trigger object as we wander. From Troller, that we do not allow ourselves to be guided by a nostalgic gaze. But how should we choose a trigger object in this city?
As with Situationism, it is of course about a personal, subjective approach and at the same time about socio-cultural perspectives. That’s why a certain anecdote from your first trip to Paris kept coming to mind.
The first trip abroad after reunification: Paris in one day, made possible by two bus journeys in the dark of night. And after you were exhausted from walking, you simply sat down on the pavement, which your boyfriend didn’t approve of at the time. And I wondered what it was like to sit and linger in the city today. Paris, la ville magnétique, is of course geared towards mass tourism and offers the paying guest a lot of cafés etc. And in recent years it has tolerated, at least for a while, when refugees set up an informal tent camp on the Canal Saint-Denis.
But I wonder how and where the city is set up for lingering and relaxing. Even for privileged visitors and residents, I remember Paris as having a heightened metropolitan pulse. Here I find very apt what Troller quoted from T. S. Eliot: ‘The main danger of Paris: that it is so stimulating. And like most stimulants, it tempts you to run around pointlessly, producing the pleasant illusion of great mental effort rather than the tangible results of hard labour.’
That’s why I’ve chosen the folding stool that you keep in your garden shed as your trigger object. So that it can serve as a resting place while you work in the streets of Paris.
Theo Steiner
