"This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things.  But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history.  Oh, Maybe there are a few statues, a legend, a couple of curios, but no past-just what passes for a future."
  Robert Smithson.  A Tour of Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey  1967

A series of trips to specific places outside of Paris

An interesting concentration of streets in ZA Foch France, outside of Paris to the North.  I chose to visit the streets because of their form on the map.

“We know that by our standards of measurement the most extensive landscape is practically the same size as the hole through which the burrowing ant escapes from our sight.”  Sir Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art

 It is important and powerful the think of the spaces we visit in one day as being so small in relation to the world.  While we are in these specific places on our treks though the days, think about all unseen and unheard of places and the people which walk upon THEM.  Then think of the preciousness of the space you are in; its specific materiality. And think of how you can fit yourself into it and take on its form and write into it a new history. 

I remember feeling at ease on this trip.  I liked being in the waves of people at Gare du Nord getting on the RER going out of Paris.  I wonder if they wonder where I am going or who I am because I do wonder that of them.

Saint Denis station outside of the Ile de France was vibrant, colorful, loud, and at the same time full of air.  I slowed down, excited to find my streets, knowing I was on the right track.  Wiling to let the place fold me out into my destination.
A long insane walk down one main Blvd., two lanes absolutely filled with cars and buses and trucks.  This boulevard ran along the river, one side next to its bank, the other just a continuation into the endless suburbs outside of Paris. 

It was as I had thought clear when I found my grouping of streets.  They were the beginning of houses and small apartments.  I began to traverse them, quiet and otherworldly, the spaces in between the boulevard and the river. 

I first became very aware of the difference in feeling walking into one of these streets verses walking back toward the Blvd.  I sensed a more sound energy walking towards the blvd, finding it to be more exciting, more monumental and telling a much truer story.  I experienced as I often have in my walks the anxiety of feeling too close to something commonplace, something like these primped houses which do not seem to shuffle like a busy street or a condensed apartment complex.

But I did traverse all of the streets, not expecting to find a monument or subject to remember, always feeling a bit trapped in this maze, but having to continue. It was the act of being within the map, imagining the form it and I take and just knowing that I am covering grounds, which drove me on.  It was like I was inflating the site like a balloon, actually giving it a new form.  This is timeless and real to me.   

Then there was a calm of the waterside, and many monuments there, subtle forms in the landscape, bricks broken, holes, plants filling the camera lens and characters way off.  Tired feet, but sweet air and sun and wind, I liked being there.
  There was that, and of course the other side, the Blvd., and these two opposites, extremes helped ease my mind. 

I have been very aware of the sides of things, one bank rather than the other, open space and crowds, upside down and right side up, my tired feet and my light mind. 

I liked the people too and being part of their landscape for just one walk.  This island of streets I went to it was not my monument, but it was my marker and therefore beautiful, the device that brought me to this new place in between, and the receiver of my footsteps.