(Photo: Survival Group/Flickr) Arnaud Elfort and Guillaume Schaller from the Survival Group have photographed these spaces that have been built to exclude in the new city. European Alternatives went to ask them about their initiative. What are antisites ? We called antisites all the spaces that have been occupied by street furniture which is anti-homeless people. These are spaces in the city that are condemned in a way. Anti-sites are occupied by objects or things -like pebbles for instance - with the purpose of forbidding undesired occupation of the space. Sometimes the purpose of these objects or sites is hidden behind the false appearance of a mini garden or a decorative object, the forms of which are sometimes creative. How did you come to create this databank of photos of the antisites in Paris? The project started spontaneously a few years ago while we developed interest on these excluding street furniture. After an initial period, it took shape as a reaction to a shocking image: that of anti-homeless furniture placed just in front of the office of the services dedicated to helping the unemployed. Placing such street furniture just in front of a place that should be one of solidarity appeared specifically ironic and shocking. We therefore organised the inauguration of this object. We covered it with black sheets, uncovered it and ‘inaugurated’ it, as if it was a piece of art. We celebrated it through a discourse that ironically valued its shape and characteristics, using the rhetoric that is usually used to speak about art. Then we started to photograph more of these spaces and it became more and more interesting. At first one sees only the most obvious ones, and then once the eye gets used to it, one discovers many of them, that are almost invisible: those that look like a garnishment at the entrance of a building, those that look like bike holders etc... We discovered a large variety of forms and styles, and some real thinking behind these forms: some of them look like minimalist sculptures. What did the process of archiving these images allow? Collecting photographs was a process of ‘localising the spaces of oppression’. These objects are sometimes violent but not all of them. Collecting pictures of them allows showing the violence of these objects that one is not used to seeing. They are not objects that one automatically sees, one needs to come back to the picture to identify what they are exactly: is it a garden? Is it a piece of garnishment? Does it have other purposes? The techniques of dissimulation are varied. One realises that there are people who think about these objects, that plan them so that they are not too violently, apparently excluding. It is a very insidious process that is grounded in the functioning of our society. It is not a clear policy of exclusion but it is everywhere. We have seen the recent changes in the city. For instance, about ten years ago, everyone was shocked when one saw the replacement of benches in tube stations by individual seats designed at forbidding ‘undesired’ occupation by homeless people. Now on the Canal Saint Martin, in spaces that used to be occupied by the tents provided by the organisation Don Quichotte to homeless people in the winter, new ‘ecologic spaces’, gardens, have been created. The antisites proceed from and reveal a specific societal organisation; that of surveillance and security. Not only are the homeless people forbidden to sit but also these sites participate in the increase of fluxes in the city, the loss of the possibility of ‘flânerie’. “Antisites” is a project of the Survival Group, currently in display in the exhibition curated by Estelle Nabeyrat, The Survival Group, 2°37E, 48°86N, Arslonga, Paris.