Ilana Salma Ortar’s work Chicago Bar, 2006, opens with an image of a large project building that appears to be either under construction or in the process of being destroyed. The text moving across the screen clarifies the context of this image; and then, without any prior warning, the building suddenly explodes and collapses onto itself. The work continues with a series of interviews with the building’s former residents – an eclectic group of individuals who hail from different origins and who belong to different age groups and cultural contexts. The work was photographed in the La Duchère quarter in Lyon, France – which was built in 1962 in order to house French citizens who were forced to return to France following the declaration of Algerian independence. This building was one of a series of large-scale project buildings designed to house large numbers of people. Initially, the quarter absorbed repatriated Frenchmen; later on, the buildings came to be inhabited by a more heterogeneous group of residents – locals, immigrants, refugees, single-parent families and illegal aliens. Over time, due to continuous neglect on the part of the authorities, serious social problems developed in this area – including unemployment, violence and drug abuse. Several years ago, the city of Lyon decided to destroy the quarter, allegedly in order to rehabilitate the area and its residents. In reality, the fact that future plans for this area focus on buildings that are no more than three or four stories high – and that the area’s population was evicted and scattered against its will – seem to indicate that the city of Lyon is actually interested in rezoning and gentrifying the area.
Following its appearance in the opening scene of the video work, the project building itself remains invisible. Yet although the focus is not on the architecture itself, an understanding of modern architecture – and of the ideological and political forces that shape it – is decisive for interpreting this complex work. The architectural utopia presented by Le Corbusier in the first half of the 20th century was based on the notion of egalitarian living conditions that would supposedly cater to the needs of all urban residents. Le Corbusier coined the term ”a machine for living” to describe these residential units – which would each function as a separate and autonomous complex connected to similar complexes by means of a network of highways.
There is no doubt that Salma Ortar’s work functions as a kind of test case for examining housing projects, unemployment, immigration and poverty. Moreover, the destruction of the building featured in this work alludes to a destruction of the modernist ideal itself – of both its architectural and moral dimensions as defined by Le Corbusier; it amounts to an admission of modernism’s mistakes, or even of its total failure. The building, which is swallowed into itself; the residents who have been scattered among other similar project buildings; the absence of a plan for socially rehabilitating this area; and the allusion to various commercial projects – all these create a harsh feeling of helplessness, indifference and arbitrary power, and a morbid feeling of destruction and annihilation – of the architectural utopia’s collapse into itself.
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