Journée d'activation — Futur parc [Future park]

“Laval. My city… my future!” Here and elsewhere, urban planning takes charge of our futures and flattens the peaks and valleys of chance. Offering a turn-key future in a controlled and secure environment seems to be the main goal of contemporary urban thinkers—all in good faith. But if these projects promise a radiant future to its occupants, are they livable beyond what has been planned? What will become of these futures once the plan has been executed? Do they have a future? Do they resist the present?

At a time when digital tools and the massive use of data help develop the smart cities of tomorrow, are we just living in evermore virtual cities, permanent building sites whose reality depends solely on the perpetual construction of planned futures?

The artists set out to test these questions on an actual construction site in Laval, suspended, like us, by the contingencies of the pandemic.This suspended future plot is the result of the confluence of the Concorde intermodal station area revitalization program and a private residential development project. It consists of a vacant lot temporarily cohabited by the virtuality of future buildings and the actuality of an ecosystem emerging from the ruins of an earlier future.

In this environment of crossed temporalities, the artists created a three month collective habitat for a variety of objects, concepts, gestures, and figures. Starting with a “Future Park,” they developed a science-fiction narrative in the interlacing of a string game (String Figures). They combined future developments with the unusual presence of a wasp’s nest found on-site, with its anarchic flora blown by a wind from elsewhere, with a drone replaying Felini’s Dolce Vita, with temporary modular housing units, with a recipe for a nomadic loaf of bread, with the multi-scale promotion of unanswered questions, with the art of Chinese divination, with binary language, with the peregrinations of a sailboat on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, with a set of environmental data, and with the speculative fossils that emerged from it.

This hybrid and reflexive work—a cross between digital arts, architecture, sculpture, and sometimes design—suggests that the idea of conglomeration should be reconsidered from an aesthetic, even ethical, perspective: to program the drift of a future built by real estate agents in the direction of a present built by multiple agents, spaces, and temporalities.