Tuesday 7 March 2006.

The movement against the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE) is still strong, even though the chances of the government yielding are slim. The demonstration today was held in unrelenting rain, the interface between the last snows of winter and the light of spring. Like last month, I followed it for a while and then slipped away – not, this time, to be with my partners on Just a Walk but simply to take refuge in a bistro. The conversation between Marcel, Jocelyn and myself has continued, mainly by email. Shortly after his first message from Abbadia, Marcel sent me a photo he took on the Franco-Spanish border. You can see a banal street, but with a barrier, as if to remind us that international fluidity, except for capital, is never really guaranteed. It's strange: Marcel, who is living on the Spanish frontier in a very different context from that of Just a Walk (the sojourn was planned a long time ago) is making himself at home there so naturally that, when I get his emails, it occurs to me that here we really are at the heart of… Jocelyn's project. My impression is strengthened when the same Marcel, back last week from Kaliningrad, sends me a message with a photo of him on horseback in a snowy landscape. He travelled to the Polish frontier, on the Berlinka road that was laid by the Germans under Hitler in order to link Berlin to the former Königsberg and is now abandoned. Riding along that phantom road (which would, I think, have appealed to W. G. Sebald, one of the greatest writers of the late 20th century, who died before his time), he came to a barrier, near a sentry box: the frontier of Europe. Just a walk but what a walk!! He has done a lot of work, some of it for the site.

Email conversation with Jocelyn. I tell him that I find the site a bit “stiff”, lacking in fluidity and possibilities for movement. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh because access to its different zones is in fact quite easy. Is the problem with the home page, as he thinks it is? Perhaps it should present the links and connections straight out, all the complexity and richness of the movements back and forth or, to indulge in an oxymoron, state the project's volatile density more clearly. One thing is certain: we need to keep adding to the contributions, to give people things to look at and read, matter for connecting, wandering and discussing. Make them want to come back!

On the use of graphics, this confirmation: “When I use graphics, it's like a critical space within the public domain.” And he also says—and this is the point we keep gravitating around here: “I espouse this heterogeneity of actions and forms. My productions and projects are, all of them, interconnected. Each element examines the same questions from different angles.”

Jean-Marc Huitorel