Romainville, Fiminco and Isaac Lythgoe

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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, especially after Covid shut everything down.

Anyway, to cut a potentially long story short, the same site now brings together those pioneering galleries, the 'FRAC Ile de France' (i.e. the greater Paris region's publicly-funded contemporary art collection), a large and, in good weather, magnificent industrial-style exhibition space, Parson's Paris, and residences, studios and workshops for about 20 artists. There are also plans, so I read, for an 800-seat theatre at the complex, and probably more I don't know about. This link is to a related Art Basel article.

One of my first visits, perhaps the very first, was to see, in the then-freezing boilerhouse, Jeune Création's 69th selection of young artists. This week, I was back to visit the end-of-residence show of Fiminco's 17 current selection of artists in residence - the link is to information about it, including a photo gallery, on Fiminco's website. Here, I'll post a few of my own photos, starting with some of the one work installed by Guernsey-born artist Isaac Lythgoe, which to me was the most striking of all: seductive, unsettling, beautifully crafted and finished, to the last detail.







The other photos start with Ismail Alaoui Fdili's elaborate, cheeky project about a university for car park attendants:





More than one project on show involves references to war and soldiery, whether during WWI, or the occupation of Iraq:









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