A lot goes on in Calais. Countless tons of freight and 40 million passengers pass through every year. The Eurostar rolls through the Channel Tunnel and ferries ply their way across the water. British consumers come and go, swapping Sterling for alcohol. Yet the flow of capital seems to bypass Calais, a city whose 78,000 inhabitants have voted Communist since 1971. That the media reacted to the local football club reaching the league cup final by calling it a »reincarnation«¹ speaks volumes about the gulf between the image presented in the media and Calais as it is.

David Jourdan went to Calais on the invitation of the city council. He is an artist by profession. He stayed just under a year. The Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle marked his departure with an exhibition, from March 15 to May 19, 2002. A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition, entitled »And Other Bargain Goods.«

As Jourdan walked through the city on the day of the final against FC Nantes (Calais lost), he undoubtedly had the opportunity to collect information relevant to his work. Or perhaps he spent his time surfing the net, making phone calls or reading the paper. The catalogue presents a picture of his daily life in Calais. We find information like the names of shops, statistics, websites, quotations, descriptions of local customs and advertisements. There are also sketches for stories, scraps of interpretation, musings and so on.

In the terminology of the cognitive sciences, Jourdan's activity can be described as the detection of »narrative micro-designs,« i.e. principles that make it possible to piece together individual facts collected at a local level into a broader, rational structure.² That aesthetic activity is a cognitive process is evident from official statuary, whose purpose is to concretise the memory of important events in a certain locality. As far as public sculpture is concerned, Calais has monuments to mariners and a square dedicated to the memory of the aviation pioneer Blériot.³

Rodin's »Burghers,« who stand in front of the city hall, are not only a modern masterpiece, but also serve as an allegory of the way in which defeats have always been fundamental to the self-image of the people of the city. Ever since the conquest by the English king Edward III in the 14th century, local history has been a litany of invasions, sieges and sackings. Calais' revenge started in the 1970s, when the populace took development into its own hands. Following decentralisation, official communications attempted to promote a city image based on geography, urbanism and architecture.

But that story is beginning to wear a little thin. The Channel Tunnel has not resulted in an industrial revival, but in the scandal of the centre for asylum seekers at the nearby village of Sangatte. Slipping between the wheels of cross-Channel logistics, those unwelcome aliens have become a symbol for the contradiction within the European system. They present a much more dramatic public issue than the behaviour of British shoppers. For their part, the inhabitants of Calais have become the unwilling playthings of a narrative logic that goes above their heads.

Jourdan describes the procedure of collecting traces as »establishing an urban myth« (p. 41). Cognitive scientists have indeed demonstrated that modelling a narrative world makes it possible for us to structure our experiences and actions.⁴ But assembling individual facts is not enough to construct a world. Mental modelling is top-down as well, and projects its contours in the form of temporal sequences and spatial patterns onto the world. Perhaps this explains why Jourdan used the theoretical stance of a researcher less concerned with factual details. Stéphane Tonnelat considers Calais from the standpoint of coming and going, of a no-man's land, and makes this the starting point for his proposed redevelopment of the area between the city and the Eurotunnel terminal. It is necessary, he argues, to »put the priority back on urban space instead of transport space«, to »amalgamate the flows« and to »reintegrate the Tunnel within the city boundaries«. But this analysis, despite being based on the history of the sculptures of Calais, does not attempt to develop a synthesis of all the analytical levels of the project »And Other Bargain Goods,« and is a victim of its own bird's-eye view - which is deliberate, as is clear from the aerial photos.

The catalogue and the exhibition leave us with the feeling that narrative modelling does not work. But could it have been otherwise? Myths, like cognition, are not individual realities but social processes. The mnemonic function of public monuments can only be incorporated into the existing body of collective stories, and only great narrative forms like the »roman fleuve,« popular movies and great cities succeed in subsuming this within themselves.

Calais is a small place that is desperately real, and may never reach the rank of a »story world« whose inhabitants struggle to win respect as a subject of history. But criticising the failure of the declared story amounts to saying that the artist in residence is not simply a scenario-writer. What Jourdan has done also comprises an »artifice« that springs only from his mind and distances him from the official commission. His obsession is the game. Chromino, Meccano, Nikko, Ravensburger, GameSpot, UltimateClubhouse, bingo and pachinko structure his interpretation of the world.

In a famous statement on art, Gadamer wrote that »to play is to be played« and that the real subject of the game is not the player »but the game itself.«⁵ Gadamer sees playful behaviour as »becoming art« - and thus achieving permanence. This kind of transformation has a part in the recent work of Jourdan.

It is there, if perhaps implicitly, that his most ironic suggestion lies. For what is the moral of the story of Calais, if not a Great Game of business and »realpolitik,« as they used to say of Afghanistan; a game in which the inhabitants/objects have nothing to lose anymore, but everything to win if they take advantage of this region's qualities and transform it into a playground of chance and necessity. After the Hell of the North, »The Hell of Game«?

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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