A parking place in the front of a huge building with high fences -within other industry buildings in a city- can be very scary or life-threatening even when you are sleeping outside on it next to a high mountain of garbage, freezing, waiting to get in, but nobody opens the doors for you…

You don’t really know it any other way in this society, you expect it to be like that. You are just happy that you are not in the situation to have to get into such buildings.

Think about huge bank buildings with high fences and poor African children sleeping in front of it…

But well, what if you knew, you are not in Afrika, but you are in France. You are not totally fucked up gamblers, but just some young travelling idealists…and inside the building there is no bankiers, but a lot of crazy freaky artist ateliers?

Wouldn’t you wonder why you can’t get into the castle?

Let us not start with the days of freezing outside and all the problémès we had in and outside of “la friche” in Lyon - the first project in France that we visited all together. Positive news first!

La friche from the inside is impressing. It is cold though, except the communal kitchen and some well isolated and heated private ateliers which people built into thehuge storage buildings

Some look like little huts, some are yurts or tipis, there are even busses inside the building (like the communal kitchen) and everything is really colourful. It is like a small “hippie village” (or how shall I call it?) inside a huge building. Amazing!

The people who use the place - around more than 150 artists organised in 6 artist collectives - are as freaky as the place of course

After entering the first fence you see the bicycle workshop:

“Ta bagnole pue” (something like “your car stinks”) says one slogan that is put on one bike there… another one: “c’est mieux en velo” (”it’s better with the bike”)

… Recycling old bikes, building very eye-catching bike-constructions, teaching people how to repair bikes, sharing their tools and sometimes helping to organise “critical masses”, which is bicycle demonstrations who shall raise ecological consciousness in the city - the bicycle guys seem to have the most used and most open space in all the la friche.

Some of us tried to take part in one critical mass taking place on the weekend we were there, but the weather seemed to have other plans for them…

The borders in between parking place and building are fluent:

There is cars everywhere: some busses on the total outside of the fence where we had to wait first, some cars inside the fence but outside the building, and then even a lot of cars and busses inside of the building. People are often riding to toilet on their bicyles.

When you managed to pass the fence, you will need the keys again to enter the castle la friche.

As we had only 2 keys for 6 people and as our busses were parking in between the 2 doors to inside (la friche) and outside (Lyon) and moreover some people were sleeping inside the building and some outside, it was really difficult to organise the movement of our group.

You would often have problems to get in if you wanted to go to toilet or out if you wanted to get some stuff in the city…

The first persons we met -and who decided to let us in and give us keys- are Francois, Raphael and Omar. The first atelier we (Sam and me) were sitting in and discussing was the atelier of Omar, very sympathetic guy, always busy, who is a theatre artist and art therapist doing many different projects.

We came with Francois, comic painter and art therapist also, to him (Omar) to ask for keys and if it would be possible to stay, but immidiately got carried away in a stream of exchanging inspirations, ideas and contacts… I felt like knowing them so well and longtime and I think it was really important to meet them.

We exchanged ideas about education networks and totally agreed that it is necessary to empower people by skillsharing to change something in this society…

We talked about art and how art can be healing people with psychological problems - and that giving comic painting or theatre lessons is like therapies very often, as so many people come who do have pychological problems…

We were also talking about fundraising and about Omar’s newest project “carré vert”, an ecological and cultural centre with a lot of ecoconstructions -and skillsharing also- in Lyon, that he is trying to find funds and other interested organisers for at the moment.

Omar, Francois and Raphael moreless stayed the only people we really got in contact with until the last evenings contact improvisation dance party at Omars place.

Most of the week we spent there the building looked quite empty, the few other people we saw were always busy. So we squatted a small empty “room” next to the bureau of Cecile who does the PR work for la friche, to make an own bureau there and spent a lot of time just sitting in the internet.

Well, ok, we had some talks with another Francois whose little nice garden outside of la friche - saving plants from the garbage and creating a little green spot in the middle of the town- we used for hsaving breakfast and meetings.

In the last evening I took part in the contact improvisation dance (which I really loved) and we found some other good contacts:

… like Kiara, a (street) theatre fanatic, working in a kindergarden in “real life”, who feels totally connected to the ideas of p2p-education and invited us to visit her in her place. She comes from Italy originally but she is living next to Marseille since longtime (anyway still has a strong italian accent that didn’t make it easier to understand her french!) and she has a lot of interesting literature about theatre that she wants to share with others and therefore scanned it and put it in the internet.

… or like Mathilde, who took a lot of tsolife-flyers, a girl who does contact improvisation dance and wants to give a free workshop in Spain in spring - she also invited us to take part in this.

All our tries to do own workshops in la friche failed, as we didn’t really find any good communication structure to announce a workshop. But I have the feeling the contacts we made are already worth the visit. And I definetely want to come back to this place when it is more warm and sunny.

Now you read so much and still don’t know why we didn’t get in: there is several reasons for this.

First reason, the history of the place is like this: the building that belongs to “la Grand Lyon”, the city state, was occupied several years ago and then legalized, which means that the city gave the artists a contract.

Since then it is an “espace publique interdit a publique” (public space forbidden to the public) as they put it- as the contract forbids events with over 50 people - so it forbids actually every open event as the people of la friche are like I said before more than 150 already. For this la friche is a very closed cultural space, an artist playground without any chance to really reach publicity in the surrounding…

Reason number 2 is they had some bad experiences with “tourists” who just came taking photos and not really being interested in the project at all, sometimes even destroying stuff or leaving their “sleep in” very dirty. Together with the bad communication structure this leads to a situation where nobody wants to take responsibility for letting strangers in.

And the last reason is they have different definitions of arts and expectations and ideas what to reach with that place: As some people are even happy that the place is so closed, as they only want to have their ateliers to work there quietly and make a living from their arts, and others want to be more open, who are mostly doing arts for more political/social reasons, it is hard for them to find solutions all together.

About organisation: they have meetings with 2 people of each collective every week to make important decisions. Moreover they don’t seem to have any central functioning communication system.

So, last sentence about la friche: this place with the thick walls, which will be closed down in about a year (as there will be built nice big commercial buildings instead of all that crappy senceless arts!) is an important meeting place and cultural centre, with lots of interesting and amazing people using it - and a lot of things to learn….

Last 5 posts by anja

• Que pasa? - December 15th, 2009
• project update - July 22nd, 2009
• erste Infoveranstaltung in München / first info event in Munich - June 21st, 2009
• back in the land of rain - June 6th, 2009
• game over ... the last day - May 31st, 2009