Curatorial declaration
Petra Krausz, Diane Daval Beran
In 2019, the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain (FCAC) met for the first time with the project managers of the new Tram des Nations tramway extension, with a view to formulating an art project in connection with this major urban transformation. Through various discussions and meetings – first with Matthias Lecoq of Explore, then with Theatrum Mundi – the project developed in a manner that was completely new for FCAC. Instead of launching a classical competition, or a direct commission to an artist with the intention of creating a permanent work of art around the future tram, the idea was to imagine art in public space through research and reflection, free from the idea of materiality. This is how the collective Tram des Nations artist residency was established, in a speculative approach that gave rise to mainly immaterial outcomes. Fully aware of the richness of exploring the territory of the tram through the prism of diverse artistic practices, the FCAC and Theatrum Mundi proceeded with a meticulous selection of artists invited to develop new ideas during this residency. The aim was to create an intergenerational group of artists, both Swiss and international, at different career stages and in different artistic fields. Setting up a residency is always a challenge. Will the artists get along well? Will they enjoy meeting and working alongside each other? A great success of this project is that this challenge was met. The invited artists have brought an incredible richness of conversation and exchange, around an immediate commonality. Their exploratory work – to which total freedom was granted – allowed them to ask questions related to the sensitive social, ecological, and economic issues revealed by the arrival of the tram line. Their voices, their subtle and generous approaches, have indeed given way to stories, encounters, debates, and ideas, which this website is the witness of. During this project, it was essential to have the latitude not to aim at any specific goal or outcome, in order to be able to concentrate on the process itself, and for artistic responses to emerge from that. The common value of this residency and its echoes on the web is revealed in the process and in the creation of a network, emotional and intellectual, serving to connect individuals and thus audiences. This is public art in a very different form from the one usually deployed by the FCAC, but the basic thesis holds true: artists are often the ones who challenge our preconceptions in the most unexpected ways.
Tram des Nations project
Matthias Lecoq
The Nations district in Geneva, home to the international organisations synonymous with the city’s name, is at the heart of symbolic transformations for the future of the entire city region. From 2025 onwards, the Tram des Nations tram line will link the city centre to the town of Grand-Saconnex and then to France, thanks to more than 5km of new line. As a result, it will even be possible to use line 15 to cross the whole of Geneva. This is an opportunity for huge progress in sustainable mobility, ecological transition, and landscape. With its new, wide bicycle path, its action on built and landscape heritage, as well as new public spaces, the heart of Geneva’s international district will be transformed. The entire Greater Geneva region is seeing the realisation of sustainable development objectives set by its prestigious resident, the United Nations, just a few metres away.
The Tram des Nations has been the subject of an unprecedented planning process, with a major public consultation in place since 2019. Its aim was to foreground the project’s temporal, technical, urban, heritage, ecological and mobility issues, so that debates and ideas could enrich the project. This process took place in two phases. The first involved a diagnosis of the site and its socio-territorial characteristics, through numerous meetings with associations and stakeholders (young people, pensioners, employees of international organisations, cross-border workers). The aim was to assess the expectations, needs and capacities for transforming mobility habits. The second phase covered both sides of the border. It could be carried out despite the pandemic thanks to a hybrid approach. In addition to the use of a digital platform, pop-up sessions were staged, as well as mobile devices, focus groups and a public forum. More than 230 contributions were collected and more than 1,500 people participated in the consultation. All the results can be consulted on participer.ge.ch.
Following this, it was important to go even further to address the social and political dimensions of the project. Thanks to the commitment of all the partners in this residency, the will to question the meanings and symbolic dimensions of this infrastructure emerged. The consultation had already been widely activated through the EXPLORE Festival in Geneva, so this was an opportunity to maintain this link and initiate an artistic residency around the Festival, with the involvement of all the departments of the State and local authorities. The EXPLORE Festival aims to propose new forms of engagement and to question the making of urban territories by involving their populations. In order to give voice to a diversity of identities, backgrounds and therefore visions, it proposes discussions with speakers from all over the world, as well as a variety of mediation formats. The Tram des Nations residencies have thus been a common thread over several EXPLORE editions, allowing for encounters between artists and publics.
Extension of line 15 of the Tram des Nations © Fani Kostourou.
Reflection
Océane Ragoucy
We say that major societal and urban transformations are subject to controversy. The extension of Geneva’s line 15, the Tram des Nations, is no exception to the rule. More than a polemic or a quarrel, controversy is defined as “a situation in which a dispute or disagreement between several parties – each party engaging specialized knowledge and none of them succeeding in imposing certainties – is performed before a third party.” [1] As a pedagogical tool, it encourages critical thinking. It is by relying on inquiry as a method that controversy can be represented in its complexity.[2] Controversy is therefore both pedagogical and open.
In Geneva, the debate around the project to extend line 15 of the tram beyond the Place des Nations to transform it into a cross-border infrastructure has begun. In parallel with the public engagement process, a group of international artists has been invited to be in residence in the infrastructure project’s wider territory. Rather than proposing an “interpretation” of the site, the project or the territories they crossed, they proposed representations of observed and lived situations through artistic means, via their respective practices.
The artists were brought together around the concept of “voice” [voix] that is practiced, listened to, and translated. It can also be understood as the “way” [voie] (to follow, to transport). According to this double dialectic, they then sought to represent what would be the physical, material and symbolic voices and ways that coexist in the tram project and participate in its imaginary.
Thus one could say that each produced piece represents one of the voices concerned by the transformation of the infrastructure. These voices are those of the water fountain at Place des Nations’, and of the material elements of the city captured by a unique mobile sound recording device conceived by Nadine Schütz. Those of the users and inhabitants of the neighborhoods that she recorded and whose landscape Alex Hanimann filmed, suspended between two moments. The voices of the crows and rooks occupying the cities where they now find food in human waste, gathered in an international association by Laura Morsch-Kihn. These are also the voices of the stones and soil measured by the surveyor, displaced when sitework begins, that Feda Wardak has invoked in a performance attended by inhabitants of the neighborhood. The voices are also those of the numerous demonstrators and activists from all over the world, who gather in front of the headquarters of the highest international organization and express the grievances of the causes they represent. They display images, posters and slogans that Collectif Ethnographic has patiently transcribed with a ballpoint pen, on a scale of one-to-one, and assembled on a giant roll of paper, like a scroll, ancestor of the book where their history is being recorded.
These voices each have their own form, their presence, their importance. Serge Boulaz has given them their own space, a lectern, an observatory from which one can see as well as be seen, a pulpit, a boarding stairway towards the staging of a potential constituent assembly. For what each work invites in its essence is to dialogue, in the most political sense, and to initiate, if not a real controversy, the beginnings of a public, open, democratic art, from Geneva and beyond.