When you no longer know how to make yourself understood after having tried speaking, writing a column in the press, writing a postgraduate thesis, unionism, teaching, politics, when you have tried entryism into a multinational, returning to the land, the roman à clef, when nothing has served any purpose, the last thing that remains, however derisory and distressing it may seem, is nonetheless the one you must do to be at peace with your conscience. Comics offer the ultimate consoling viaticum on the path to renouncing everything, when you tell yourself that after all our planet counts for nothing in the light of what we know about the Universe. What does it matter that humanity has ruined it, it will disappear one day, it is programmed, we will not escape it, so leave it alone, as the other one says.
Well no. It’s stronger than us, we protest, we tell, we testify. At least that’s what Alia Bengana, Claude Baechtold and Antoine Maréchal did with their album entitled ConcreteIt is published in the collection La Cité graphique of Presses de la Cité.
Alia Bengana, let’s start with her, is an architect. She has worked all over the world; I don’t know how old she is, but I don’t think it’s a question of age, all architects old enough to be one today, at least those who studied in France, have only one god: Le Corbusier. His real name is Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris. A sort of Picasso of architecture. Except that Le Corbusier also did abstract painting, quite insignificant between us, while Picasso was careful not to build homes for the people. I’m even willing to bet that he never lived in concrete. Only cut stone, even at the time of his destitution.
A hell of a thriller
It is her story that Alia Bengana tells in Concrete. And her story begins with Le Corbusier, whom she makes tell the story of concrete from the Romans of the 1st century BC to its prophet, Le Corbusier, the great concreter before the Eternal. Bengana recounts that in her architecture school, half the students wore glasses copied from those of the “Fada”, as Le Corbusier is still called in Marseille. “Concrete is freedom!”, she makes him say. The modern world exists thanks to concrete. He is the only one.
Disciplined but not disciplined, the young architect is seized by doubt: “Don’t you find it absurd to import sand into the Sahara?” The furious Fada throws her from his scenic railway memorial by calling her a traitor. And the other story begins. Not the one told by the fascist-communist who builds concrete rabbit hutches to offer the proletariat happiness through equality, no, the true story of the murderous, corrupting, invading concrete. A hell of a thriller. To give you an idea: concrete needs sand, but not just any sand, sand that can only be found on certain beaches, and that’s where the rabbit hutch builders go to get it, without holding back, destroying everything in the process, because they’re only passing through, preferably at night.
In 2011, when Alia Bengana wanted to build a guesthouse in Timimoun, the “red oasis”, in the heart of the Algerian Sahara, her idea was to use earth, because it provides better protection from the heat. But no one knew how to build with earth anymore. All the local companies had switched to concrete, importing sand from the beaches of the Mediterranean. Bringing sand to the desert is the triumph of modernity.
Concrete is an outdated material, the future of construction belongs to straw, that is understood, but since nothing has a future, we let it slide.
I haven’t mentioned the other two authors, Baechtold and Maréchal, the scriptwriter and the illustrator, but they did a good job, too.