Laboratoire d'architecture de la foule Can Onaner & Mathilde Sari

Site imaginaire, France

September_December 2020

The confinement leads to restrict the vision to a limited frame: the window. Far from limiting our imagination, it allows us to escape mentally. The project is presented as a collection of memories from individual confined experiences. An archive of words, phrases and quotes collected on the Instagram page "Dimension cachée" translates the feelings of confined individuals. These short writings are expressed in the form of nouns such as: "Lunch outside" or "Indoor garden", but also descriptions: "We unfolded the ironing board for our aperitif with a view", allegories "I set up my room under the spell" or "There are even days when I hear the moon breathing" etc. Therefore, through our project, we wish to honor these dreams through architectural representations inspired by theater and scenography in order to create a real atlas of memories constituting the collective memory. It is this heap of memories, translated through reconstructions of confined situations, which will then characterize our immaterial crowd. This new system that we imagine to be mechanical follows the logic of the variable: an experience produces an immersive device. Thus, through our scenario, we elaborate a new means of expression, federating human crowds, allowing each one to identify himself and to testify of a collective experience. Transcribed in scenes, these immersive devices constitute a material collective memory linked to the physical, psychological and sensory state generated by this imposed collective confinement. Their arrangement forms an imaginary site created from fragments of real sites taking the appearance of a theme park. An ambiguous universe in which artifice and pretence play with their codes.