Sara Davin Omar/Confront
→ Portes Ouvertes
From Loud Secret to Silent Opening
Europan 16, 2021
With Gilles Caron and Pauline Delorme
Sart Hulet, Namur, BE
Located on an intermediate plateau between the river Meuse, the railway and the departmental road, the abandoned military site of Sart Hulet is isolated from the activities of the rest of the city. Paradoxically, the secrecy of military activities did not make the site fall into silence. On the contrary, the barbed wire fence and blurred aerial photos communicate its hidden character to the world. It is a secret and everyone knows it.
Portes Ouvertes proposes to valorize this sense of obscurity by inviting inhabitants of the city to discover the site for simply what it is: a "terra incognita". To do this, a strategy of appropriation of the site is initiated by an extremely discreet gesture: unlocking the doors of the fence surrounding the site. Starting from this opening, a calendar divides the appropriation into six concrete actions: opening, await, observation, accompaniment, inhabitation and extrapolation. These are translated into spatialities and gestures on the site. A series of images illustrate possible appropriations, based on the existing spatial configurations. These images, inhabited by a crowd of diverse protagonists, bring together uses that take place in the different temporalities of the calendar. A staging that embraces the diversity and complexity of potential experiences.
Open doors means offering almost nothing so that a lot can change. It means upholding a critical position vis-à-vis the master plan as a “neutral” tool to conceive a large-scale project. It means avoiding to speak in terms of programs, activities or zones but rather of uses, experiences and territories. It means widening the biodiversity of the site by acknowledging that life is a flux of changes.