Romainville, Fiminco and Isaac Lythgoe
Romainville is one of the old industrial suburbs that stretch out north of Paris along the Canal de l'Ourcq. It is now forging ahead, as part of a broader regional plan, with an ambitious, even spectacular transformation project, focusing on what's called the Quartier de l'Horloge. This project includes the creation, on the abandoned sites and in the empty but listed art-déco buildings of the now-departed pharmaceutical industry, of what's meant to become one of Europe's biggest contemporary and performing arts complexes. Already, a couple of years or more back, pre-Covid, a handful of intrepid Paris galleries moved out to ' Komunuma ', on a site re-designed by the Freaks architectural agency for Fiminco, a property developer with its own arts foundation . Five miles from central Paris and a good quarter-hour's walk from the nearest métro station, surrounded by rubble, mud and bulldozers, they must have wondered what they'd got themselves into, esp