sorry for 'stealing' this from nettime, but thought it
would be of interest to people here that might not
read nettime.
ryan

Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 07:49:07 -0800
From: N Bookchin <natalie@action-tank.org>
Subject: <nettime> Interview with Isabelle Massu

Hi nettimers,

I know its hard to think about much right now except
for the actions of
the axis of evil: Blair, Bush and Aznar, but for a
diversion, here is
an
interview I did with freedom I mean french artist and
activist Isabelle
Massu in the fall for 2002 for a spanish journal Red
Digital You can
read
it in spanish with illustrations here:
http://reddigital.cnice.mecd.es/3/entrevista_comp_2.html

best,
natalie


Isabelle Massu: Between Two Worlds: An Interview with
Natalie Bookchin

Isabelle Massu (isa@aux2mondes.org ) is an artist
currently working on
a
Net art project called aux2mondes. She has a
longstanding involvement
with
public art and alternative media. In 1995, she
collaborated with
Margaret
Tedesco on a year-long collaboration with a group of
homeless people
from
San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness. Parlor
Game: a Popular
Version
was a series of board games depicting the city rules
and regulations
San
Francisco's homeless had to bypass or confront in
order to survive. Six
different board games represented the different issues
and branches of
the
association such as Housing - Not Borders and Shelter
Outreach. The
games
were displayed as posters on Market Street in downtown
San Francisco,
and as an insert in the coalition's newspaper "Street
Sheet"
(www.sf-homeless-coalition.org).

In 1996 Massu joined the French feminist association
Les Penelopes
(www.penelopes.org) which had, at the time, the only
significant
Internet
presence representing the feminist movement in France.
They produced a
newsletter and a Web TV program offering world news on
women's issues
and
feminist analyses of neo-liberal globalization. Les
Penelopes is
more
than a media outlet; Massu traveled throughout Africa,
Europe, and
Latin
America giving workshops to women on media literacy
and the strategic
use
of new technologies.

In 1999 Massu became a member of La Compagnie,
(www.la-compagnie.org),
an
artist collective and an exhibition space in the heart
of downtown
Marseille, in a neighborhood called Belsunce. The
majority of
Marseille's
substantial North African residents live and work in
Belsunce, which
has,
since the nineteenth century, received immigrants from
across the
Mediterranean. Belsunce and Marseille are both
currently the targets of
local and European Union funded "rehabilitation"
initiatives, the
latter
known as the Euromediterranee Project.
Approximately one and a half
billion Euros are being invested in Marseille with the
hopes of
transforming the city into a booming commercial center
and a tourist
attraction. This is the largest amount ever given to a
European city by
the EU, and the funds are being allocated for downtown
real estate
development and restoration projects, aimed at
attracting international
investors and businesses. Downtown is being "cleaned
up," pricing out
its
current occupants to make room for a new population of
professionals,
businesses, and tourists. A new high-speed train
linking Paris to
Marseille has been installed.

Marseille's considerable immigrant population and its
rampant
unemployment
and poverty are an aftermath of another era's
commercial (and more
overtly
racist) enterprise, French colonialism. During the
height of
colonialism
in the nineteenth century, Marseille, nicknamed `Porte
de l'Orient,'
flourished as the main port for travel and trade to
the French
colonies.
Throughout the twentieth century, immigrants,
primarily from the
Maghreb
countries of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, were
recruited to France as
"guest" workers. Men were shipped over without their
families and
offered
deplorable living conditions to discourage settlement
when the work ran
out. Recruitment and immigration accelerated in the
1960s during
France's
economic boom and into the 1970s, when an estimated
two million North
Africans immigrated to France, many remaining in
Marseille.

With the end of colonialism, activities around the
port of Marseille
began
to dwindle, ushering in widespread unemployment. The
end of the
Algerian
war in 1962 brought massive migration from the newly
independent
country,
including about 150,000 pieds-noirs, French citizens
who had settled in
Algeria, returning to their homeland. Many of the
guest workers who
had
stayed on after their work had finished were permitted
by the French
government to send for their families. With the sudden
increase in the
population, unemployment and poverty, already a
problem in Marseille,
became endemic. The middle class began to abandon the
city, leaving the
poor and the immigrant population to deal with its
crumbling
infrastructure.

In 1999, Massu her current collaborators inherited La
Compagnie from a
collective of artists who had previously run the
organization for five
years. The new collective began to put considerable
effort into
defining
their role and position in relation to the uneasy
situation in
Belsunce.
Their goal has been to bring diverse cultural
activities to the
neighborhood, but they are also very cautious of the
role their
existence
can play in accelerating the gentrification process.
They have
initiated,
supported and developed a variety of projects
including aux2mondes.With
aux2mondes Massu and her collaborators are developing
an on-line game
and
archive exposing the gentrification strategies of the
city and the
current
situation in Belsunce.The rules of the game will be
inspired by city
and
state political rules and regulations. They are
planning the release
date
to coincide with the inauguration of a new public
library in Belsunce,
a
major event and symbol of the "rehabilitation"
project.

Natalie Bookchin: What brought you to live and work in
Marseille?

Isabelle Massu: I lived in San Francisco for 10 years.
In 1996, I
decided
it was time to return home, and spent a year looking
for places to
live. I
am originally from Paris and didn't want to go back to
a place that
felt
so familiar. I visited a friend in Marseille and fell
in love with the
city. Part of my attraction was that, like San
Francisco, Marseille
is a
cosmopolitan port city, and although it is France,
it doesn't look
and
feel like the rest of the country. Mediterranean
culture is very
present.
It is a very intense city, partly due to its
geographical positioning
at
the edge of the continent. After all the orderliness
and quaintness of
San
Francisco, I was looking for a city with more of an
edge. Marseille is
the
second biggest city in France, yet had been generally
disregarded by
the
French government until recently. It is the only city
left in France
where the downtown is poor and the immigrant
population, the majority
of
which is Algerian, lives in the center of the city.
The two other large
French cities, Paris and Lyon, have already
"rehabilitated" and
gentrified
their centers, which are now richer and whiter, and
the immigrants have
been pushed to the suburbs.

When I came to Marseille I moved to Belsunce, a small
neighborhood
sandwiched between the main train station, the
entrance to the city's
freeway, and the port. Belsunce brought back familiar
feelings and
sensations of growing up in the suburbs of Paris. When
I was six years
old, my stepfather decided to move to the projects,
which was typical
of a
French proletarian family in need of a bargain
apartment. The projects
had
just been constructed, and were being sold as
attractive, new, and
modern.
This was the 1970s and the projects were also being
used for
temporarily
relocating some of the newly arriving Algerian
population. We were in
the
minority as so called Francais de souche, (roughly
translated as "old
stock or native French). This was the first time I
encountered
immigrants,
and I witnessed a lot of racism. The immigrants were
seen as intruders.
Their religious practices, which were completely
unfamiliar to us, were
seen as evil and barbarian. From the dead lamb in the
cellar to the
henna
on my friend's hands and feet, I had a lot of
questions that were never
answered by my family or school. France's role in
Algeria was not
discussed. We learned about World War II, but never a
word was
mentioned
about what amounted to almost a century of French
colonization. No one
talked about the protectorates, yet the schools were
suddenly filled
with
kids from these places. Returning to Belsunce in
France in 1996
reminded
me of the confusion I felt as a child, and I began to
think about the
situation as an adult. I felt very comfortable in
Marseille, feeling
that
I simultaneously belonged and didn't belong. I knew
there was something
in
this that I wanted to investigate, but I didn't know
exactly what form
that investigation would take.

NB: You left France when you were twenty-two and spent
ten years, much
of
your adult life, as an immigrant in San Francisco. Now
you are back in
France, and carry an American and a French passport.
You have worked in
activist organizations as an artist, and in artist
collectives as an
activist. You are attracted to Marseille as a city
located between the
north and the south, between France and North Africa.
Your project
aux2mondes resides between physical and virtual
spaces. It seems that
you
value the "in-between" not as a transitional space,
but a place to
locate
oneself and one's work. Can you talk about your
interest in the
"in-between?"

IM: I don't know if it's an interest as much as a way
of being in the
world, something that I have had to be all my life. I
don't want to be
too
psychoanalytical, but I will say that the first
"in-between" was
between
my mother and my father, who divorced when I was very
young and lived
in
different places. It was between the two of them that
I really found
myself, and still do. I have always been drawn to the
interstices,
whether
it is between places or identities. To be "in-between"
is to not have a
closed-in, secure, or fixed position. Maybe it's not
a very determined
way of being in the world, but for me, any other
position is too
constraining. Being fixed in one position does not
allow you to see the
other side, whereas being "in-between" allows for
movement and insight.

And of course one can talk about the strategy of the
"in-between" in
aux2mondes. The project is based in Belsunce, where
most people are
between two worlds, between Algeria and Marseille,
between the secular
state of France and the religious state of Algeria,
between being
welcomed
as a citizen and being an illegal alien. But the
in-between aspect of
the
project really lies in how it structures and defines
public space.
aux2mondes looks at both the limits and possibilities
of physical
spaces
and the virtual spaces. We are using the Net as a
public space to
reinvent
situations, propose alternatives, and denounce the
progress of
gentrification. aux2mondes needs both spaces: the
physical space of La
Compagnie is a direct and critical link with the
people who are
threatened
by the gentrification.

NB: Marseille seems to be trying to erase Belsunce. If
the local
population is made invisible, there is no need to
address them. Can you
talk about how aux2mondes works against this process?

IM: The city, the state, and the newspapers praise the
expansion of
urban
renewal plans. The process is said to be socially,
economically, and
culturally enriching, but for whom? The rhetoric is
always addressed to
a
privileged population, as if the population being
displaced did not
exist.
Politicians describe this center as the "throbbing
heart that it once
was"
before the arrival of the immigrants. The politician's
goal is revealed
through their vocabulary: rehabilitation, restitution,
reanimation,
reorientation, reinforcement, resurrection, and above
all re-conquest.
We
intend to give a more realistic picture of the
so-called "enhancement"
of
a city. By collectively writing another story, we
reiterate the
universal
droit de cite.

This is in some respects how we are depicting the
situation as a game
in
aux2mondes: like most popular games, we are recreating
a real
situation.
Think of Monopoly, Sim City, Europa, games involving
commerce, city
planning, colonization. In aux2mondes, the city and
state political
rules
and regulations are our sources of inspiration. We
are inventing
another
site, inventing a "counter" Belsunce,another Belsunce,
another public
space, one where we could strategically play with
equal opportunities
to
win or lose, one where voices could be heard, a public
space where one
could interfere, exchange, network, a non-static net
within the net. It
is
the Net, and it is fluid, not fixed in space or time,
allowing us to
continue the story we are experiencing here, and to
invent other
stories,
strategies, and challenges, as the gentrification
process continues
here
and everywhere.

"the population in downtown is for the most part
people with a very low
income; we need to crush this phenomena."
la Marseillaise (local newspaper) 24.05.96

NB:You are now in your second year of working on your
project, yet do
not
seem to be in any hurry to publish anything on the
Net. Can you talk a
bit
about your work process?

IM: The whole first year we did extensive research
into the historical,
social, and political situation in Belsunce. We have
been conducting
workshops and interviewing people who are or have
lived in the
neighborhood. For a year, Martine Derain and I have
been working with a
group of local women. Other members of the collective
are working on
other projects and workshops, such as Johanne
Larrouze who organizes
workshops for kids and adults that relate to the
events taking place in
our space. She and David Bouvard, another member of
the collective, are
working on a mini festival of Scopitone films for next
year. Scopitone
films were the 1960s precursor to today's music
videos. They were
distributed on 16 mm film with sound and shown on a
Scopitone film
jukebox, found in bars across France. Joanne and David
are focusing on
scopitones made for immigrants. Most of them were
about working hard in
France, leaving the country, wanting to go back or
wanting to remain. A
lot of them had strong sexual connotations, perhaps in
an attempt to
entertain lonely male workers who were brought over
without wives and
families.

Debates and lectures at La Compagnie often address
problems in the
neighborhood, such as the local economy, as well as
national and
international issues such as rehabilitation projects
in other cities
and
how other collectives and associations work with
immigrants. We also
have
an artist residency program, which tries to introduce
an outside
perspective on the situation. Martine and Dalila
Madjhoub, two members
of
La Compagnie, are currently working on a proposal for
a public art
piece
in Belsunce in collaboration with two French
architects. Their
extensive
research on city politics will be added to the
database of aux2mondes,
as
will the work of the others mentioned above. We are
calling the archive
and database of aux2mondes "The Library." It will
mirror the "real"
library currently under construction, which is viewed
as a major symbol
of
the gentrification process in Belsunce. Its strategic
geographical
position is supposed to placate the local population.
However, it will
also attract students from nearby and newly
constructed universities,
which are attracting a younger generation to the area.
They will
probably
be among the first new settlers in Belsunce.
Therefore, as most locals
would agree, this library is not really for them.

"When you go to Aix Street, they give you low income
housing for around
3000frs. What does it mean? It's not the poor people
who are going to
live
there, especially with "Marseille-habitat". If you
want an apartment
they'll know where to find you one, a one room in
Belsunce or a 6 room
apartment in the north of Marseille. The choice of
course is quickly
made!"

"La Cite de La Musique, they did not build it for
us. The minimum you
need to pay for classes for your kid is 400frs!! I'm
telling you, this
is
not for usS The library, I don't think it's gonna be
for us either, I
really don't think so!"

Fatima Rhazi, resident of Belsunce, 2001

NB:Can you talk about the workshops you have been
running with the
women
from the neighborhood?

IM: The workshops came partly out of my feminist
experience, and from
working in a neighborhood where public space is mainly
inhabited and
controlled by men. Women appear primarily in private
spaces, mostly at
home. What really stood out for me is their
invisibility. Muslim and
Algerian women are doubly invisible: they are
invisible as Muslims and
Algerians in France, and invisible as women in Muslim
culture.

The women would come to La Compagnie with their kids.
The men from the
neighborhood would come and go, but some women kept on
coming back. We
began to develop friendships, while simultaneously
developing a series
of
workshops. They wanted to learn how to use the
Internet. It seemed that
after one year what was most important to them had to
do with
communication: email and forums. The Net became a way
for them to have
a
voice and to access information on their own, without
having to rely
solely on television or reports of the outside world
by the men.

For some, the interest was to feel closer to their
home country, and
they
would participate in online forums dedicated to
Mzabite culture (a
group
well known for its puritanism in Algeria). The
anonymity in this
context
allowed "feminist" voices to come out. These were
forums where it
appeared
that only men were chatting, but, as would happen in
an ideal public
space, they were suddenly filled with women's voices,
challenging
misogynist beliefs in a very direct manner.

Later on, as they became more at ease with the use of
computers, the
women
started to write their own stories of their arrival in
Belsunce. They
trusted that their voices would be heard but their
identities never
revealed-some of them are illegal aliens in France.
We will make audio
and text material from the workshops available in
aux2monde's Library.

NB: Tell me about the funding of aux2mondes. Are your
funders aware of
your intentions?

IM: We have been given fairly substantial funds from
the city and the
Ministry of Culture despite the fact that Marseille
doesn't have much
money for culture and the arts. I believe that this
has to do, in part,
with our strategic location in Belsunce and our
potential as artists in
the neighborhood to placate the population.
Politicians believe that if
people are distracted by culture they wont need to
dwell on the
unpleasantness of their situation. The cultural
events are supposed to
act as a crutch, to compensate for what the city is
not offering them-a
decent education, parks, and playgrounds. None of this
exists in
Belsunce.

In a neighborhood which has been labeled as
disreputable, La Compagnie
bridges the different populations throughout the
various events we
organize in Belsunce. As artists, we have to be very
diligent about
what
we are offering in this context. We need to constantly
look very
critically at our own position and the one placed on
us by the
government,
which believes it is useful to have a public art space
in this
"targeted"
neighborhood. We are not fooling ourselves into
thinking that we can
restrain gentrification that has been happening for
over ten years. But
at
the same time, we are not willing to fully satisfy our
funder's
expectations, and we refuse to permanently occupy the
position they
outline for us, though at times this position is
unavoidable. For the
most
part we have been free to do as we please, but I
suppose aux2mondes
will
trigger a lot of political debate once it is online.

NB: Why do you assume that gentrification is
inevitable? Is there any
attempt, from your group or others, to resist the
rehabilitation
project,
which could prove to be disastrous to the hundreds of
immigrants living
and working in the neighborhood?

This rehabilitation project has been studied by
sociologists, urban
planners, and the city for quite some time now, and
has convinced much
of
the population that it is being done in their
interest. And some of it
probably is, but lies and promises are being used
successfully as
strategic weapons. For example, the city is offering
families the same
rent to move into the projects on the edge of the city
as they now pay
to
live in Belsunce. This could be seen as a good
opportunity for some,
but
others, like old and single men living in cheap hotels
(a substantial
portion of Belsunce's population), do not want to be
displaced or
isolated
one from one another. The working population does not
want to have to
commute long distances to work in downtown Marseille.
Why should they
have
to be the ones to move to the projects?

Resisting an underhanded, tricky government is more
challenging then
one
that is blatantly violent. Some groups are organizing
to inform people
of
their rights as citizens and tenants, but there is not
much being done
for
the illegal immigrants. It is difficult to fight for
people's right to
stay here when technically they do not have such
rights. Our form of
resistance is at times made up of small daily
gestures. We are offering
a
critical perspective, and that is in itself an act of
resistance.
aux2mondes has no pretenses about changing the world,
and locates
itself
in between activism and art. But from both
perspectives the intention
remains the same: making its participants visible.
That is our plot in
the
game.

www.aux2mondes.org
The first part of the project will be on-line October
2003.

Edited by Claire Barliant and Natalie Bookchin

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