Balades nocturne à la quête du noir urbain
This project is part of a broader artistic investigation into the sensitive and political dynamics of nighttime public space, with a focus on the idea of darkness not as emptiness, but as a space of potential.
During the first weeks of the Design des Territoires residency at La Villette, discussions with members of the park’s team revealed a strong vision for the site: to gradually transform the Parc de la Villette into an urban refuge for flora and fauna. This perspective shaped an initial research direction, centered on the public lighting system and its impact on the rhythms of non-human life. This inquiry led to a series of individual nighttime observations conducted on-site between October and February, usually between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. The Parc de la Villette offered a rare setting for such exploration, being one of the few green spaces in Paris open all night.
Over time, the focus shifted from the sole issue of lighting to a more conceptual and sensory dimension: darkness as a spatial phenomenon. While the first phase of the research explored the benefits of darkness for non-humans, attention gradually turned toward the potential benefits humans themselves might find in experiencing darkness in public space.
In the latter, Aragon describes the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont as the place where “the unconscious of the city has nestled” — an intuition that nourishes the reading of darkness as a potential space, crossed by imaginaries and collective unconscious forces.
A protocol of individual exploration was set up: ten nocturnal strolls were carried out to map the park’s darkest areas — spaces perceived as fertile ground for altering one’s usual relationship to the urban landscape. This phase of dérive was accompanied by theoretical and literary readings, including Walkscapes by Francesco Careri and Le Paysan de Paris by Louis Aragon.
To extend this reflection into a collective dimension, a participatory nighttime stroll was organized. Each participant was given a rigid notebook — the Carnet des gribouillis — designed as a tool for sensory and introspective observation. An exercise in “eyes sketching” (blind drawing) was proposed, aimed at capturing the mental projections elicited by walking through darkness.
The materials gathered from this experience fed into an installation presented at the final exhibition in the Jardins Passagers, conceived as an interactive device for collecting nocturnal imaginaries.
Through the collective nighttime stroll, envisioned as a practice of attentiveness and connection to the urban night, participants engaged with darkness as potential space — one that is at once intimate, political, and ecological. As Aragon suggested, when the unconscious of the city nests in its nighttime spaces, a collective passage through darkness may bring us closer to its texture — not to dissolve it, but to feel it, as one of the gifts darkness can offer to humans in the public realm.
Some chance encounters in the park — such as that of a young man seen briefly in the dark — revealed the mechanisms of mental projection at play in the experience of darkness: what unsettles is not so much the presence of the other, but the image we construct of them in the shadows. Entering a darkened space within the public realm activates a particular tension: it triggers a process of projection, where indistinct forms become supports for imaginary narratives — at times anxiety-inducing, at times poetic. Darkness thus emerges not as a void, but as a potential space, charged with affects, questions, and stories. Far from being a simple absence of light, it becomes a medium of sensitive experience.
Photos by David Aubriat