Suchergebnisse

Fast food and exoticism.
We often associate fast food with Mac Donald's, which plays a prominent role in criticism of this kind of restaurant. Mac Donald's, but also Quick, Burger King and Flunch keep on conveying myths of post-war modernity : taylored production, conformity with norms for the sake of an imaginary egalitarianism and the utopia of beating time. Currently, we are witnessing a spread of this kind of restaurants which are either under head offices in the USA, managed directly, franchised or, like Quick, subordinated to French mass marketing companies. Boredom prevails in these places, due to the uniformity of the premises and the food we consume. The resulting indifference is the most obvious «crime». Demonising Mac Donald's, as Paul Ariès does in sociology or José Bové in politics, may not be the best reaction to fight against what must be called a collective dispossession of territories.

Till Eulenspiegel : Übungen der Macht und der Verspottung.
Das Grundwerk der Französischen Literatur in Belgien, die Legende von Till Eulenspiegel von Charles de Coster, lässt sich, genauso wie eine Universalsatire eines perfekten Anarchisten, als eine grosse Stunde staatlicher und anti-klerikaler Moral eines freien Denkers des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts lesen.
Sie erhält auch derzeit ihre ganze Stärke und Wirksamkeit aus der Verspottung, als eine Art volkstümlichen Widerstandes.
Im Mittelpunkt steht die extreme Gegenüberstellung der zwei Personen : der eine, Till Eulenspiegel, zeigt das Leben und stellt das Volk dar. Der anderer hat die absolute Macht, auch über Leben und Tod, Philipp II, König von Spanien, Erbe von Flandern. Der Autor stellt so eine mythische Zeit vor, in der die Urheber von Unglück und Verbrechen identifiziert, verantwortlich gemacht, verurteilt und schuldig gesprochen werden.

Chemistry of Border-Zones : refuse and waste, from the 18th to the 20th century.
In the 18th centuiy, the odours of refuse-dumps, foul-smelling rivers, and graveyards are unpleasant and alarming. People start suspecting that this state of things could be related to the outbreak of epidemics.
Thus, all the objects which seem threatening in the immediate vicinity are removed further away. Great spaces are cleared, where the by-products of life and human activity can be dumped. But at the end of the 20th century, there is no longer any possibility to dump refuse «elsewhere». Chemical stenches caused by production, the piling-up and incineration of waste, give birth to protest and opposition : it is once again hard to make out what is due to sensation from what is really toxic. On the border-zones, fears are more insistent, because these areas reveal a new form of intolerance.

A passport no longer valid for a collective memory and local identity.
Passport is a frontier, an ephemeral one which is sanctioned by an administrative and military device on the crest of the Vosges, a separation between Alsace and Lorraine, and between 1870 and 1918.
This «modern» frontier followed after a moving (blurred) frontier which was challenged and contested during centuries always situated at the boarders of the property belonging to Dukes, Kings and the central authority of the Republic.
These frontiers left traces which are still visible 70 years after their disappearance.
These physical traces and the traces in the memories, whether conscious or unconscious, are voted in the survival of original cultural characteristics of the local population, which continue to be a reference for them.