Sébastien Thiéry, a Rescue Ship
What if the Centre Pompidou-Metz had a maritime extension? A rescue ship, under the aegis of Unesco and under the European flag, on board which would be preserved, through the perpetuation of the act itself, the world heritage of humanity that consists of the gestures of the rescue sailors?The hypothesis is, like all the actions of Sébastien Thiéry, coordinator of the PEROU (Pôle d’Exploration des Ressources Urbaines), of great relevance, both aesthetically and politically. Building an actual rescue ship and making it sail by granting it the status of a work of art to inscribe rescue at sea and migratory reception deep in the European DNA. By putting it to sea, Thiéry wrenches the art world out of its navel-gazing and speculative insignificance, and restores a real political significance to design. CC
The project is based on the premise that, in order to show hospitality, it’s essential to start from the beginning. Designing a boat to rethink sea rescue would be a way of placing design at the heart of political action. At the Orléans Architecture Biennial, in which the PEROU featured in 2017, it had also been a question of gestures: a catalogue of acts of hospitality documented in Calais in 2015, where a certain idea of habitat was sketched out. All these acts that make up habitat are precious and must be gathered and passed on in order to anticipate the migratory difficulties that are on the horizon. Future generations will experience migratory flows a hundredfold. The research and creation work around these gestures is a way to prepare for this.
The ship will be equipped with a device that will make it possible to pull the boats onto the ship without the unstable movements of the survivors at the time of rescue causing them to capsize. For the past six months we’ve been closely observing the actions of the rescue sailors in order to suggest a suitable vessel. The ones used today aren’t designed for mass rescue. We’re therefore in the process of designing a tool that will allow us to amplify certain actions based on real-life experiences. This vessel, which will be a catamaran, will have a double invert. This type of platform is used in particular in the navy to quickly recover a boat. But this isn’t the only innovation we’re offering. The ship will be a pioneering intervention tool in every respect. We’re also taking into account life on board, and in particular the fact that survivors sometimes spend a lot of time at sea. The ship will therefore also be designed as a place to live.
MARITIME EXTENSION
How is the architect Shigeru Ban taking part in this project? The starting point was an invitation from the Centre PompidouMetz to propose a piece for the celebration of its tenth anniversary. At the time I was a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome, and I was working on the registration of acts of hospitality as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Very quickly it became clear that rather than making yet another work about the migrant crisis, it was better to produce a piece that was active on the fronts of contemporary hospitality. I asked Shigeru Ban, designer of the Centre Pompidou-Metz and of world-famous emergency architecture, to create a maritime extension of the museum, based on the principle that the museum’s function is to keep alive what’s of value. The museum would then be extended with a floating annex that would keep the actions of the rescue sailors alive. Specifically, the first act was to activate the PTS (Paper Tube Structure) that had been installed on the roof of Beaubourg when the Centre Pompidou-Metz was built.This extension, which was made to reflect upon Metz, (1) has been there since last June and allowed us to design the next step, namely the construction of a ship for the Mediterranean. Shigeru then preferred not to work on the ship itself, considering that it needed a great naval architect. We then asked Marc Van Peteghem who, in addition to having the career we know, has developed a programme of humanitarian naval architecture with his association Watever. That was in September, and he’s since mobilised his teams and his enthusiasm for the project.
Another important reference for the project is Barca Nostra, a shipwreck that was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2019.This ship sank in 2015 with more than 700 people on board. Barca Nostra is a readymade that is part of the critical function of art, with an assumed polemical horizon. The question I ask myself is how to go beyond the ready-made and conceive a “really-made”. Can a ship operating in the Mediterranean obtain the status of a work of art, and operate better because of it? The hypothesis is that this status could provide the ship and the people on board with a new kind of protection, so that preventing the ship from sailing or docking would become an act of vandalism.
Is it really supposed to see the light of day? It will take a conjunction of players to make it happen. A group of designers has been formed: the designer Marc Ferrand has joined the project, as have Ruedi and Vera Baur today, and tomorrow other artists, designers, architects and students who will make the ship a joint project. One thing’s certain: the amazing team that’s forming around this project is determined to take action.
GESTURES OF SAILORS
You’re asking a cultural institution to take on a job that should normally be done by states. Rescuing and transporting migrants is a huge responsibility, and I wonder how a cultural actor can fulfill this role. There’s another aspect to consider, which concerns the representation of these gestures: how can we take them out of the restricted framework that prevails today and make them present in the world in a different way? The issue of migration is inevitably associated with the spectre of disaster and future excesses, even in the eyes of those who defend reception. Too often, we talk about the duty of humanity, as if the act of welcoming were onerous. It’s too often claimed that we can welcome migrants if there aren’t too many of them, implying that their large numbers could cause problems. The challenge is to produce affirmative thinking about what needs to be done. Not a sad or resigned mode of thought, but one that would precede what awaits us: the innumerable. There’s a whole perspective to be recomposed here. We need to reconstruct the political consideration of what’s taking place
and what might take place. Bruno Latour has shown it very well: the answer to a problem is already in its representation and in the way it’s posed. This is where the responsibility of a cultural institution such as the Centre Pompidou-Metz lies: to contribute to the upheaval of the order of representations, and through a coup de théâtre for example, to open the field to other ways of acting in the world.
In this project, research and creation are closely linked.The gestures of the rescue sailors are of such beauty and significance that they need to be well described, protected and transmitted. We are indeed in the field of action of a cultural institution, and I’m grateful to the director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz Chiara Parisi for supporting this logic of effective production.This operative work of art therefore has every chance of being realised. Today, when we know that four thousand people die at sea every year, it’s not one, but ten ships like this one that must be produced. The project therefore integrates the networking of cultural institutions, but also educational establishments, art, design and architecture schools, in order to imagine and then collectively manage the research centre that will be installed on board. This ship will be the maritime extension of several institutions. The idea is that this conceptual work be continued so that the ten ships needed are actually built, by extension again, and by others than ourselves.
DREAMS OF EUROPE
It often happens that ships are blocked because of flag issues. How do you intend to solve this problem? The hypothesis of a Unesco flag is stimulating but insufficient. The PEROU isn’t a state, and it’d be unthinkable to apply directly to UNESCO to have that international organisation place the ship under its protection. Anyway, the Unesco label cannot replace registration. This is one of the project’s many legal issues, along with the question of deterritorialized maritime law and the obligation to submit to specific labour legislation.
For once, the deregulation of maritime capitalism could work in favour of humanitarian progress. The European flag’s a very nice hypothesis that was raised by MEPs ten years ago. The idea would be to ensure that the home port of the ship wouldn’t be a national territory but a continent. This is the legal creation that we’ll also work on. We must understand that migrants dream of Europe and that the level of hope of these new arrivals is an extraordinary opportunity for tomorrow. Europe built ships to colonise, exploit and enrich itself, and was founded on a gesture of capture. We want to envisage a contemporary Europe based on a gesture of hospitality.The challenge is to inscribe in the political imagination a project for Europe’s survival.This ship for the Mediterranean will therefore have a dual function as a tool and as a work of art: to operate on the high seas and simultaneously on our imaginations.
1 The first installation of the PTS on the terrace of the Centre Pompidou in Paris prefigured the design of the one in Metz. The same module was assembled in Metz, this time to prefigure the ship.
Sébastien Thiéry holds a Ph.D in Political Science and is an associate assistant professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris Malaquais. He is a member of the editorial committee of the journal Multitudes and the author of several books and films, including Des Actes. À Calais et tout autour (Post-Éditions, 2018), resident 2019-20 at the Villa Medici (Rome). In 2012 he founded PEROU (Pôle d’exploration des ressources urbaines) with landscape architect Gilles Clément.
Christophe Catsaros is a critic of art and architecture. He writes a blog on the city, art and politics on the website of the daily newspaper Le Temps.