performance - video - VIDEO STREAMING of a short segment from the end
Bicycling Boulevard Haussmann, Paris 2013
Baron Haussman and his city planning consisted of breaking up the middle age narrow rhizome of streets and inserting big avenues (les grands boulevaards) thus enabling the army to better and more swiftly access and control the working classes that revolted some years earlier in 1849 with barricades and violent street protests. Haussmann worked under Napoléon Bonaparte III and stood for a conservative proto-fashist regime that pushed through modernisation in an autocratic way. The coup d'etat and the establishment of the emperor's dictatorship is the subject of a great analysis by Karl Marx entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1852. Napoleon III commissioned Haussmann already in 1852 to "modernize" Paris and create wide streets that could not be easily blocked by barricades. Haussmannisation definitely can be credited for breaking up the 1871 communes in a very short time since the army overran the protesting Communards without much physical resistance. The linear destruction of pieces of the antique Paris accomplished thus the destruction of a social Paris and accellerated the alienation of it's population as well the the disintegration of a feeling of social and political autonomy.
Alone the name of one of these grande avenunes, the Avenue de la Grande Armée, (the Avenue of the Big Army) is telling you quite a bit. No wonder why the last communist "emporer" Ceausescu had large parts of Bucharest destroyed for building his own Chausse-Elysées. The Apprentice in the Sun - Bicycling Bucharest, 2006, is a piece that consists of just pedalling against the on coming traffic, in the middle of the streets, against the stream, filming. I ride the full extend of this big boulevards modeled after one of Haussmann's projects.
Marcel Proust lived between 1906 to 1919 on Boulvard Haussmann. Beaudelaire complained about the loss through Haussmannisation in many of his writings. The Situationists under Guy Debord accentuated their critique by calling urbanism as such a "state science," a "captialist science." (see wikipedia) - In case of Haussmann, I prefer to call it even a "Police Science" since it moved the eyes and arms (tentacles) of the police very quickly across the entire city.
Bicylcing Boulevard Haussman is bicycling the second of Hausmann's twelve radiating avenues which I have so far used for my bicycle projects. The first one, entitled Bicycling Les Champs-Elysées, Paris 2008 was significantly ended by the police. This is the only non-law abiding project where the police was able to catch me during my ride since is not an easy to catch me while riding against the traffic. It says a lot about the motorcycle equipped police force of Paris.
Paris is now using bicylces for policing.
danger:
It is inherently dangerous like most of my bike projects and to be seen as a small act of civil revolt. Danger is an important aspect of our life and provocations are important getting a point across. Thus, it mimics some of the violence inherent in our daily order. Bicycling Boulevard Haussmann is also a distant mirror of the crazy historical aspects of Napoleon Bonapart III's time, his aggressive urbanism replicated throughout Europe and the repressions of the so-called Holly Alliance.
This non-law abiding action has to also be seen as some kind of coup or stroke against the order of our urban status quo, in which car traffic dominates nearly everything.
In my bicycle manifesto I ask for the redistribution of urban space and demand a 50 % partition of all urban streets for bike traffic only. This is a demand that reflects today's realities and technologies (e-mobility; high fuel prices; pollution; obeisity of people due to minimal movement; redistribution of urban space as some kind of anti-urbanism) and is ment to be an activist pamphlet for urban renewal and urban justice that takes bicycling as full partners.
postcriptum:
a brief sentence about my bicycle projects in general:
With my BICYCLE WORKS I see myself as someone continuing the tradition of the 19th century flaneur and the dérive projects of the Situationist's but on a bicycle while riding and connecting significant points within a city - see more here: www.useabicylce.com
stunt bicycle riding: JOHN TAKI - MAY 22, 2013 -- IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY
This is the last video of this series of my across-the-grain bicycle rides. It is also the first and last ride not done by me. For Bicycling Blvd. Haussmann I hired a stunt bicyclist who I found through crowd-sourcing. I was lucky to find John Taki who was biking and filming for me. I wanted to see the bike ride and I wanted the see it in relationship to Alfred Jarry's ghost biker winning the 10,000 mile race in which the winner was a kind of a chimera. In this sense... . one should also point out this was also the first ride announced in advance and a couple of informed people did show up but not everybody saw the rider.
performance - video - VIDEO STREAMING of a short segment from the end