“Before and Beneath Arkhangelsk–Severodvinsk” is an anthem to anarcho-primitivism, inspired by the slogan of the May 1968 student uprising in France: “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Beneath the paving stones, the beach!”).
“…affirmant que la phrase existait dès mars 1968 sous forme de réplique dans la pièce de théâtre d’Armand Gatti Treize Soleils de la rue Saint-Blaise, qui traite de l’urbanisme destructeur au cœur du 20ème arrondissement de Paris.”
“…claiming that the phrase had already appeared in March 1968 as a line in Armand Gatti’s play Treize Soleils de la rue Saint-Blaise [Thirteen Suns of Saint-Blaise Street], which deals with destructive urban planning in the heart of Paris’s 20th arrondissement.”
« On cherchait quelque chose à rechercher sous les pavés pour inciter le chaland à les retirer, c’est venu assez naturellement car pour noyer les grenades des CRS on ouvrait les vannes des trottoirs et l’eau coulait sur le lit de sable qui servait d’assise aux pavés parisiens. Pour évoquer un avenir paradisiaque commun aux deux compères, si différents de philosophie, nous n’avons trouvé que notre joie d’enfant à la plage. »
— Bernard Cousin, Sous les pavés, la plage. Quarante ans après [Under the Pavement, the Beach: Forty Years Later].
“We were looking for something to be found beneath the paving stones, something that would encourage passers-by to pry them up. The idea came quite naturally: to neutralize the CRS tear-gas grenades, we would open the street drains, and the water would flow over the bed of sand that supported the Parisian paving stones. To evoke a shared paradise-like future for the two companions, so different in their philosophies, all we could find was the childlike joy we felt at the beach.”
— Bernard Cousin, Under the Pavement, the Beach: Forty Years Later.
In an age when neoliberalism, embodied by monopolistic property developers, sets fire to the dilapidated wooden architecture of our cities—architecture that people still inhabit. In an age when pseudo-socialism erected short-lived wooden housing and supposedly “eternal” state structures on drained marshland. How is any of this different from sacrifices made to the bogs that are truly eternal precisely because they are in a constant state of flux?
Will-o’-the-wisps appear in the form of accidents at the Third Sawmill, built, after all, on a cemetery. What lies beneath our cities? What existed before them? Were ghosts once our friends, rather than elusive triggers?