Location: Venice, Italy
Date: 2018
Programme: Curatorship
and Scenography
Client: Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
(initiative de la Cellule architecture) in collaboration with Wallonie-Bruxelles International
Status: Completed
Area: 250 m²
Budget: Confidential
Curators :
Traumnovelle
Co-curated by Roxane Le Grelle
Artistic director :
Sébastien Lacomblez
Spatial installation :
Traumnovelle & Roxane Le Grelle
with Sébastien Lacomblez
Authors :
Eurocode 7 -Traumnovelle & Roxane Le Grelle with Dennis Pohl
Journey to Eurotopie - Bruce Bégout
Photography :
Philippe Braquenier
Collages :
Claire Trotignon
Political advisor:
Lucile Rossat
Graphic design :
6’56’’ (Jurgen Maelfeyt, Jonas Temmerman, Lien Van Leemput)
Assistant curators:
Jordan Jacob Zekri
Nina Closson
Apolline Vrancken
Research and developpment :
Francesca Pedroni
Macha Bouteiller
Clarisse d’Hoffschmidt
Romain Deboulle
Kalliopi Dimitrakopoulou
Arthur Duval
Anne-Marie Fagoaga
Camille Gardien
Jonas Huchet
Jeanne Krings
Cassian Nandin
Mattia Passeri
Antoine Reboul
Caroline Roure
Luna Van Aubel
In 2018, Belgium granted Eurotopie the occupation of its Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia. Through a multi-layered approach to the construction of a future Europe, curators Traumnovelle, in association with Roxane le Grelle, posit architecture and space as mediums for democratic expression.
Brussels is where Europe has, for several decades, been taking place. Beyond a shared space, the existence of the European Quarter in Brussels is a survival requirement both for Europe and for Brussels. Although the European Quarter can be considered as the spatial expression of the European political system, it is, for reasons such as history, morphology, finance and security, impervious to citizen empowerment. By accepting the role of hostess of the common venture called Europe, Brussels has de facto accepted the responsibility for its spatial anchorage. Eurotopie therefore offers to create the European Quarter’s lacking civic space within the Belgian Pavilion itself, and thus to entice visitors to ponder, discuss, debate and, ultimately, to commit to constructing Europe. Contributions by philosopher and author Bruce Bégout, photographer Philippe Braquenier, total artist Sébastien Lacomblez, architect and philosopher Dennis Pohl, artist Claire Trotignon and graphic designer 6’56’’ (Jurgen Maelfeyt) are to be found in “Voyage to Eurotopie” travel diary, which takes the European Quarter in Brussels as a case study for a supranational architecture.
I
THE PAVILION
Here is a sanctuary where citizens are building the new Europe. It is vast enough to gather crowds, secluded enough to embrace the lonely steps of those who seek answers. It can be explored from top to bottom, left to right and diagonally, revolving bodies, searching. The light is opalescent. Its intensity varies following the variations of the seasons. The floor is ultramarine blue. It reflects onto the walls and colours the space. It is consensual. It is a relic. The masonry walls are painted white. Eyes tend to lose their focus. It is either very hot or very cold. The pavilion reacts to the climate. The space is cross shaped. At its centre is a 5.3m diameter circle at which 27 people are seated. Scale is different here. Some doors are 1.4m high. Bodies must fold themselves in order to reach the alcoves. Vestiges of other uses can be perceived. The pavilion is made up of seven spaces, all the same, all different. Their widths vary from 3.2m to 10m. Their lengths vary from 5.8m to 17m. Their heights vary according to the ground and movement. At the centre, the radiant ceiling is 6m high. In the lateral niches, where those who prefer to ponder alone the state of the Union seek refuge, it can be reached with fingers. The ground rises, dips, and rises again. Movement recomposes a dodecaphonic ode throughout the space. There are steps. At 30cm high, they are both obstacles and resting places for tired bodies. A travel diary, brought back from Eurotopie, can be leafed through. Citizens listen to other citizens speaking of Europe’s legacy and of another Europe yet to be. This space is a pavilion, this space is a sanctuary, this space is a place. People crying or people laughing may be encountered here. Others shouting and lecturing. This space is one of those in which secrets can be whispered. Citizens are free. Here, Eurotopie is under construction. This is your pavilion. This is your Europe.
Welcome to Eurotopie.
II
EUROCODE 7
We have discovered a new land that is neither near nor far. At times youthful, yet at times decrepit, it has existed for
several millennia and will most likely outlive us. It is sometime called a “continent”, sometimes a “peninsula”. It seems to stretch from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, yet it boundaries are ill-defined. Occasionally doubted, it has also inspired remarkable faith. We have called this land “Eurotopie”. Built upon the ashes of totalitarianism, Eurotopie ridicules methodological nationalism and the derelict nationstate.Eurotopie deconstructs the idea that nations creat societies. Eurotopie is a call for liberation from the underlying myths of peoples, nations, and power. Eurotopie is a mirror our time, taking what it receives and reflecting it out towards a new destination. Eurotopie strives to repoliticize our world considering neoliberalism to be a lever rather than an invariable given. Eurotopie seizes its existing tools to define a new field
of struggle. Eurotopie is a common dream, the last utopia, the hope for shared ambitions. Eurotopie is a metanation,
beyond nations. It embodies an emancipatory project, the only narrative
that is able to counter nationalism. Its most singular manifestation, despite its incompleteness, is in Brussels, in the regally-named Leopold Quarter, which
is sometimes also referred to as the European Quarter. In Brussels, we thought we would find one walle capital within another, something akin to the Vatican inside Rome.
We expected an overload of symbols: expressions
of power, order and domination.Some say the European
Quarter appeared out of nowhere, that there was no founding vision.
Some say it lacks ambition, that its buildings have no architects, that its streets have no planners. What we found was an infra-ordinary manifestation of supra-national power, cemented into archaic architectural forms reminiscent of obsolete powers. Eurotopie is a-symbolic and non-hegemonic. What we uncovered was an invitation, although a restrained one, to think reality in a different way, and by doing so, to imagine new tools to change the present. What is Eurotopie, you ask, and how may one reach it?
In what follows, you will find seven new perspectives on the European Quarter and Europe. These are to be understood.
AVATAR CAPITAL
2018: We start with an archaeology of thought, moving retrogressively through the sedimentary layers o the Leopold Quarter’s history. To begin with, there is the Schuman Roundabout, with the ruins of a public arena located at its centre. It was once called a “new icon for a
democratic Europe”, but no demonstrations or public debates
have ever taken place on these stairs. Just beneath a layer of dust and dried vegetation, European stars decorate
the blue pavement. We find an expired PDF file entitled “Brussels, Capital of Europe”, containing articles by twelve
self-declared intellectuals, all trying desperately to come up with symbols of Europe.1 Two such symbols, which never
represented anything: a digital flag and an invented barcode. Right below the pavement, we find the remains of a deflate “€-conographic” circus tent, which was put up here once when it was determined that Europe lacked “eloquence and
enthusiasm”.2 A few centimetres lower, someone has buried architectural models and drawings featuring symmetrical axes,
columns, arches, and monumental squares. A manifesto that was exhibited in the Bozar, then forgotten.3 As J.G. Ballard
may have said, “this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence”. We also find an old draft from that
period, entitled “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe” Its Article I-1 begins with the words: “Reflecting the will of the citizens and States of Europe to build a common future….” Who were these citizens of Europe? And why did they bury their common future together with all these symbols? Some frequently cited founding fathers insiste that Saarbrücken, historically situated on the movable Franco-Prussian border, be designated the symbolic capital.
This became a bi-national matter, which brought that discussion to an end in 1954, along with the European Defence
Community. Hopes were only rekindled with the Treaty of Rome, which led Brussels, Luxembourg, Milan, Nice, Turin,
Strasbourg, and Stresa each to be considered as potential capitals of Europe, although without anything approaching
the symbolic significance provided by monumental architectural master plans. Instead, there were maps tha focused on the infrastructure connecting major European cities. Discussions about the symbolic capital of Europ shifted into a poetic-material debate, where infrastructural links facilitating the carbon democracy of the European Coal and Steel Community prevailed over concerns of
mere architectural symbolism.
Further, those links were certainly not built by the “founding fathers” themselves. Europe has been shaped ove the course of centuries by a network of capillary interconnections. Capillarity, faire cap (head for), capital city, “capital”
question. Europe as an autre cap (another stage or heading). A cape, a little geographical promontory, an “appendix” to the body and to the “Asian continent”.4 For many centuries, this cape did not require any symbols. This fictional moment
of a contemporary past helps us to bury all the architectural symbols and recover our common future. Europe is on it way in a city that is the way of the future .
Brussels does not need the symbolic architectural decor of Europe, a Europe that cannot, in any sense, be reduced to a single image but rather is always becoming and is constituted by its very heterogeneity. Rather than symbols,
we need an anti-aesthetic architecture that does not feign to represent a Europe that is not seeking to be represented.
The Leopold Quarter is populated not with building-symbols but simply with Avatars. It is shaped by an Avatar Capital, an
Avatar-Trickster, that conceals a mesh of invisible connections. We have been tricked if we take this Avatar to be real.
MYCELIUM CITY
The European Commission is usually associated with the Berlaymont building. Yet if we take a look throug the “critique of ideology” sunglasses from John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988), we will not see the “real” messag behind the facades of capitalism; instead, we see an X-ray that passes through the buildings themselves and reveals the
secret underground tunnels that connect the buildings of the Leopold Quarter to one another and to railway stations and
Zaventem Airport. We see shielded Ethernet cables, conveyin surging data to and fro between servers and humming archives. We see 50 Hz electrical wires fed by a hidden independen. power supply station. We see telephone and fax lines strung between the Berlaymont and Brussels’ other 68 EU Commission
buildings. We see glassy optical fibres transmitting media from the assembly spaces to the Berlaymont’s television station. We also see radio waves beaming out from the antenna atop the Berlaymont to a geostationary Astra satellite
that broadcasts to over 156 million households in Europe. These satellites are managed by the European Global
Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GSA), with headquarters in the Holešovice district of Prague in the Czech Republic.
The GSA is but one of the EU’s 40 decentralised bodies headquartered in over 32 different cities across Europe.
The European Commission has direct links to six executive agencies in Brussels and Strasbourg, and the seven main
institutions of the EU are located in Brussels, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and The Hague.
One of these seven institutions is the Parliament, which was duplicated in 1992. This must have been the place where the theme of Brussels as a Capital of Europe
reappeared. Doubling the Parliament with a Strasbourg location was supposed to allow the 751 MEPs and their staff and documents to travel by rail between the two cities.The Brussels Bi-Parliament was set up in the Place du Luxembourg; protests by previous residents and countercultural occupations only managed to preserve a 12 cm layer of the facade of the former Brussels-Luxembourg railway station on this square.5 This Bi-Parliament is attached to the transit system
like a network node, merging it into a networked democracy, which is in motion and in a process of constant becoming.
The railways of this transit system were important not only because they enabled the free circulation of goods, services, capital and people, in keeping with the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Schengen Agreement. Train tracks, airport connections, telegraphy cables, wires, and satellites—the whole conglomeration of poetic-material connections—
were already crucial factors in the decisions taken regarding the location of European institutions in the wake of the 1951 Treaty of Paris.
We begin to grasp the complexity of the rhizomatic network of the EU, as it extends down into the smallest units and
atoms. We begin to see that Europe actually is an interconnection between terrestrial sedimentary layers and extraterrestrial atmospheric and exospheric layers. Our sunglasses shutter not our capitalist but our modernist illusions. The architecture of the EU
cannot be reduced to a single building; it is a complex mycelial organism expanding, tentacle-like, into everyday life. The Leopold Quarter thus cancels out the autonomy of singular buildings. Here, to design means not to rely on the immediately visible, but to relate to the whole mesh of invisible connections. Institutional and executive dependencies,
decision-making processes, communication strategies, radio
waves, Ethernet cables, corridors, elevators: everything is interrelated. The invisibility of these connections is what
constitutes Europe. It is not the buildings that make this place. The Leopold Quarter is made not by buildings but by the
adaptable network of Europe.
CRYSTAL FORTRESS
The Crystal Fortress of the Leopold Quarter brings a medieval past into the future. It is wrought of moats, barriers,
bulletproof zones, surveillance cameras, X-ray scanners, metal detectors and other security technologies. Its primary material,
glass, is often confused with transparency. For instance, the former president of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek,
argued that this architecture would fulfil all approaches to a transparent democracy by representing transparency and the evolution of Europe. It is misleading to suggest that more transparency leads to more democracy, simply by the us of glass. This faulty analogy also underlay the design of the West German pavilion, by Sep Ruf and Egon Eiermann, at the
Expo ‘58. Democracy is not a building material; it is a practice. Further, the EU is not a parliamentary democracy. It can be
described as a form of governance: “Governance does not restore the schema for the representation of identities central
to republican regimes… but instead attempts to create socia order without representation”.6 The fortified zone of the Leopold Quarter is a state of exception that has a constitutive role for the everyday life that surrounds it outside the fortress. “The zone”, moreover, “is exactly how we created it ourselves, like the state of our
spirits… but everything that’s going on here depends not on the zone, but on us.”7 was Brussels needs this crystal fortification to ensure that European politics will function. Such spaces of exception cannot be confused with public space.
The integration of civil society
occurs not by means of public access, but through atriums located within the crystal buildings. Here, informal encounters occur
among a wide range of groups and individuals: activists, counterpublics,
NGO representatives, MEPs, lawyers, managers and industry representatives. Within the crystalline forts, it is up to
us to create modes that allow for a common political practice
INFRASTRUCTURAL CONDITIONS
March 29, 1962: The Loi organique de l’aménagemen du territoire et de l’urbanisme , a law concerning Brussels’ urban planning, is passed. This spatial protocol transformed the Leopold Quarter from a residential district into the seat
of European institutions. Rather than trusting that expansive urban master plans would be able to construct a Capital for
the Common Market, the Mayor of Brussels, Victor Bure, and his Minister for Public Works, Omer Vanaudenhove, decided to set up a legislative tool for the construction of European institutions.8 Since it did not include a finite overview of how the new European district should be structured, it allowed these institutions to expand infinitely. Property owners who held more than 50% of a bloc were given permission to join single plots together into a unified whole and expropriate any remaining owners. This is how large-area office buildings sprang up all over, in response to speculative requests for space by different European institutions and community members, even though at the
time no one knew what Europe would become. The spatial protocol works “like an operating system, the medium of
infrastructure space makes certain things possible and othe things impossible. It is not the declared content but rather the content manager dictating the rules of the game in the urban milieu”.9 This idea can be extended here to include the European milieu. The European Union itself is a content manager; it sets up the infrastructural conditions that make
everyday life possible, ensuring the unimpeded circulation of the four pillars (goods, services, people and capital) in the EU and the access to resources (energy, food, education, etc.)
throughout the continent.
The setup of operating systems in the Leopold Quarter and the European Union reveals how paradigms of spatial planning systems have shifted. They no longer have
anything to do with merely constructing aesthetic objects that function as symbols, but instead they are concerned
with class operators. Emancipatory planning practice means following
the cues of software engineering and becoming a coder who looks for the kinds of bugs that engage operating systems in critical ways. Instead of waxing nostalgic for the modernist planner of the past, we need to code script for our common future.
XENO-ARCHITECTURE
26 June 1958 : Paul François, head of the building company François et Fils, sends a letter to Pierre Marchal, Premier Secrétaire d’Ambassade (First Secretary of
the Embassy) and Ministre des Affaires Étrangères et du Commerce Extérieur (Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign
Trade). This letter proposed constructing a building that would contain 2,000–3,000 office units on the site of the nineteenth-century Berlaymont monastery, at the edge of the Leopold Quarter.10 Financed by the Belgian state, construction began, but without a client, a function, a program or even a facade. Instead, there was just a hope for a future Europe and a certain financial interest in locating at least part of it in Brussels. A speculation towards an open future.
The Berlaymont is “not a static object, but a moving project ”.11 It is impossible to determine exactly when the construction of this building really started or whether it has ever ended. One can only speak of transformations from one medium to another in the co-production of several tools and techniques, ranging from speculative numbers in a letter to paper files, flowcharts, citizen protests, financing plans, circulation diagrams, cardboard models, ink liquidity, ruler lengths, building regulations, habitations, condemnations,
renovations and all the other “ations”. The Berlaymont is a work of Xeno-Architecture in a process of becoming, one that exceeds conventional architectural categories. It has never been modern.
How can architects announce “the death of modern architecture”,12 yet still continue to talk about architecture in
terms of project, grid and ratio? Architecture remains trapped in the same modernist aesthetic regime when it is constructed and criticized in terms of the categories of symbolic facades, columns, arches, pergolas, balconies and stairs, proportions and the expressive qualities of certain uses of materials. If these
conditions continue, then we will never become postmodern. Architecture is made not of facades, columns, arches, etc., but of the techniques, tools and knowledge that shape the process of production. Like Haraway’s cyborgs, we have always been caught inextricably in the technology
DODECAPHONIC MACHINE
The spaces in which the Assembly meets in the Leopold Quarter are equipped with translation chambers.
Sitting in these assembly spaces means being connected up to microphones, headphones, buttons, monitors and synthesizers that interface with the translators working in 24 different
languages. Hearing and speaking are multiplied by parallel voices as words become extrapolated into 24 new semiotic contexts. These spaces catalyse a simultaneous production
of new meanings and objects, as spoken words are translated at every moment. This phenomenon culminates on the Rue Guimard, where the European translation agency (ETC)
provides an official translation, interpretation and writing service,
thus institutionalizing the intangible act of translation. Walking through the city, on the paths of spoken sounds, leads from the Leopold Quarter—a multiplicity of territories in which English
is pronounced in different international accents, with fictional words and invented grammars—over a series of European communities and regional dialects, to the peripheries of a
sonic Europe. There is a sonic map of Europe, which coexists with the map of Brussels and traces the fluent borders and transitions of this “cape”.
If the historic discussions of the early 1950s had accomplished their goal, Esperanto would now be the single
official language of the EU. However, this would imply the existence of a consensus based on an artificial univocality. Instead, it is precisely the plurilingism of Europe that makes
possible its heterogeneous politics of dissensus. What constitutes Europe is thinking through the words of others,
the possibility of being affected by the meaning of words in another context, a meaning that differs from the meaning of one’s own words. It allows for a phantasmal thinking, a thinking that is necessarily affective. The attentive affective openness to others is what
has shaped Europe over the course of centuries. Culture can never be identical with itself; if it were, this would be a tautology. It is always the relation between what it is and what
it is not.
Therefore, culture always needs others in order to differ from itself. A “culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the double genitive and of the difference to oneself ”; monogenealogies are therefore always populist mystifications of a cultural history.13 Europe does not have
a single origin, because it is shaped through an historic openness towards other futures. Nothing is lost in translation, but there is always an
untranslatable remainder. It is precisely this residuum that is the constant production of something new: something that does not yet exist and will not be recreated in another
language, but will instead create a new difference in meaning. Here the becoming of language and meaning is perceptible. Through the words of others, we can connect with other subjectivities, other places, other times, by re-configuring our own. This constant creation of new meanings is precisely what ties Europe together. Only a common project of thinking
through one another’s words will allow us to become true future companions, future-companions of a multi-linguistic machine.
CITY WITHOUT A MODEL
Radiant city, grid city, linear city, free city, walking city, garden city, plug-in city, Sim city, whatever city: the list of
hegemonic planning efforts to conceptualize cities in terms of
grand-narrative models is infinite. Brussels never had a single narrative dictating how it was supposed to be constructed. Built and un-built, Brussels has always been influenced by a
patchwork of narratives: the Besme plan from 1866, which took Rome as an ideal; Andersen’s and Hébrard’s proposal for an international world city in 1910; the construction of Boulevard
Anspach and Avenue Louise, as inspired by Haussmann’s Paris; Brussels North, with its 48 towers, which is intended to resemble Manhattan; or Vanaudenhove’s metropolization by way of car-friendly tunnels and bridges, coupled with
the techno-motor-topian dreams of the Expo ‘58. At the same time, Europe is what Jacques Delors once
called a UPO:
a sort of unidentified political object that doesnot have any predecessors or models to guide its development. Although Altiero Spinelli once called for a model of a Federal Europe, to be based on a constitution and citizenship, this was never fully realized. Especially with the pragmatic effor to establish the European Coal and Steel Community and with the Cold War situation, whenever Europe sought to project
itself into Europe, the resulting image was that of an Empire. Europe, indeed, is alone, but Europe alone can save us. In order to awaken, become unified, and take action, Europe needs a new mytho-motive14 to counter the symbolism of Empire. It needs a “minority” myth-making in which citizens can unite and give Europe a mission. Political
identities and projects must unfold in the rewriting of myths and narratives. Eurotopie is such a myth. It is a myth for
a new Europe, whispered from the dark corridors of the Leopold Quarter.
1 EU Commission. The Capital of Europe. Final
Report. Brussels: European Commission, 2001.
2 de Graaf and Rem Koolhaas. “€-conography.
How to undo Europe’s iconographic deficit?”,
in: Rem Koolhaas (ed.), Content, Cologne:
Taschen, 2004, pp. 376 – 389.
3 Pier Vittorio Aureli (ed.), Brussels, a Manifesto:
Towards the Capital of Europe. Rotterdam:
Brussels: NAi Publishers, 2007.
4 Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading:
Reflections on Today’s Europe. Translated
by Pascale Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas.
Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 21.
5 Isabelle Doucet, The Practice Turn in
Architecture: Brussels after 1968, Farnham,
Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015.
6 Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009,
pp. 347 – 348.
7 Andrei Tarkowsky, Stalker (1979).
8 “Now, the Common Market is a demanding
man who wants to have everything necessary
immediately to hand the day after his honeymoon.
He hasn’t the time to wait for his
capital to be built bit by bit.”
