#mathiscollins

What will become of the wreckage of train that unrailed inside the Bretigny railway station during the summer of 2013, once the experts have conluded their investigations?

I ask myself this question as I travel through Brétigny on board a train heading to Cahors where I am to join a residency in the village of Les Arques. I film our high speed passage through the station with my phone oriented at a 45° angle from the window, heading forwards. And during the very short time that this shot lasts, I am thinking of the fate and nature of accidented things and the physical shock it must have been unrailing here. I also think of the Brétigny contemporary art center, an institution known for its political stances. After stopping the camera, I immediatly realise that this film will not become an artistic or conceptual quote. I also know it is impossible to buy the wrecked train.

The image of the train station now on the screen of my phone, is only the second I see since the day the train blew part of it away less than a year ago. The first one came from a television set in a small digital camera shop in Perpignan I hade entered looking for a camera at a good price, an hour after the accident. I remember the shop owner answering my curiosity about the crash by repeating the informations going in loops on the banner at the bottom of the screen but not telling me of any good deals. I would buy a camera on sale a week later in a bigger store and get it stolen the month after, in my friend's car, that we had forgoten to lock. I've used the camera on my cell phone since then.

Minutes before capturing Brétigny, I shot another video in Paris's Austerlitz station from where my train is to leave. The workers from a company contracted by the French Railways to clean the trains and stations have demonstrated for reasons I don't know but can only imagine.

They have emptied as much garbage around and inside the station as the station and its surrounding posessed. And because no strikers are to be seen this morning, I believe the action is not solely about covering our shoes with our trash, but also about not picking it up.

As I am late for the train and walking with the camera on, the film evokes the aftermath of a natural catastrophe or of a terror attack. During this travelling, my other hand drags a big nd fluffy green rolling suitcase that I must lift every 10 seconds to get rid of the shit that accumulates between its wheels ;

And I think of Joseph Beuys and his students sweeping up Düsseldorf on a 2nd of may, transforming the trash and the brooms into the art work Ausfegen (sweeping up), 1972, later to be sold at a benefit sale in support of the conflict opposing Beuy's free classes to the selection criterias of the Art Academy of Düsseldorf. The sale would work fine and Beuys got expeled from the academy.

I wonder if after my departure people picked up and sold the trash in benefit of the cleaning staff ? But the first sentence I hear boarding the train is : « They're wasting their lives and ours too... ». I wonder what the speaker means by assessing that the demonstration may actually not be the result of degrading working conditions, but it's cause. Now I may not have fully understood the man, but I do know for a fact that the french and perticularly the parisian public transport commuters have less regard and patience then they used to, for those affecting their travel. I also know for a fact that the french have less regard and trust than they used to, for foreigners living in France and who we know, compose the bigger part of the French Railway's cleaning staff.

If I am late for the train, it is partially because in front of the Austerlitz station, I recognize a man that I've seen on screen two months ago in the documentary film by Claus Drexel Au bord du monde (2013). Au bord du monde is a voyeuristic tear jerking joint on the nightlife of homeless people in the center of Paris, which Jean-Michel is a homeless part of. Jean-Michel is sitting against a trafic light, eating a sandwich next to a stack of stuff that makes it look like someone is sitting next to him. I tell him I've seen te movie and ask him if he has too. I do not understand his answer. And because I remember understanding his sentences in the movie, I believe Drexel must have spent quite a while with him in order to gain his trust. I also believe Jean-Michel was playing an act for me in order not to answer my question.

image: Claus Drexel

Arriving that evening, I visit the residency's library and find a DVD copy of the documentary film Le plein pays (2009) by Antoine Boutet, a previous resident here at Les Arques. Shot in the region during two years the movie follows Jean-Marie, a man who has lived secluded in the forest for the past thirty years, where he's dug a cave that he ornaments with messianic carvings about over-population and records song on virgin love. Au bord du monde and Le Plein pays are similar in that they follow marginal people with fragile psychiatric profiles, use an abstracted language, and with whom the directors have shared their lives in order to create a relationship. But the movies oppose in the space that the directors give to their own voices. When Antoine Boutet doesn't say a word, Claus Drexel talks a lot and asks questions such as : Do you miss your children? If both movies received good critics, Au bord du monde was a commercial success.

image: Antoine Boutet

A few hours before watching Le plein pays, a man gets off the train in Poitiers and leaves the bankrupted newspaper Libération on the seat behind him. I pick it up and read an article on the Start Up Week-end in Rio de Janeiro, an event where to develop a social and innovating buisness in 56 hours.

Over 600 Start Up Week-ends have already been organized all over the world but this is the first one to take place in a favela with the participation of its inhabitants. With the assistance of designers and entrepreneurs they've focused their inventions around issues of waste management, creating wages, education and culture. The contest is won by a 70 year old man with his project for a lowcost mobile health care center. His prize is an XBOX, a smartphone and a year in a Start up incubator.