Cyclocity

Produced for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, the architectural model Cyclocity focuses on the railway site in the city of Nancy, which repeatedly appears in Bertrand Lamarche’s work in its twofold aspect. on the one hand, the model pays attention to urban reality and its surroundings, in both their architectural and cultural dimensions. on the other hand, it breaks up this reality into fictional elements, that the artist then puts together and takes apart, as in a scenario. Seen from the Kennedy viaduct in Nancy (FR), this head-on panoramic view shows a reality that has been partially erased, exposing the urban gap left after the disappearance of the prison and the destruction of a portion of the Centre de tri Postal (the mail sorting center) built by Jean and Claude Prouvé. What thus appears is an emblematic case of the expressive dimension pertaining to a particular conception of architecture around 1968-73, an intrinsically precarious architecture, marked out for dismantling.