ZONE C is based on images taken from public housing projects in the banlieues of Paris.

“Life always has the last word,” says Le Corbusier in Le Modulor, providing a key to interpreting his work: a standardized architecture, far from any aesthetic pleasure, which avoids ornaments and decoration but is in perfect harmony with the actions and requirements of the human body. It was by following the Swiss architect’s advice to “design houses in series” that the first apartment buildings of the Parisian banlieus were constructed: spacious, luminous, built near major industrial centers and far from the city. Over time, however, all the intentions for integration and social wellbeing linked to the birth of new neighborhoods plummeted and, with them, the buildings and their inhabitants sank into an abyss of misery, marginalization, lack of prospects, racism and political vacuum.
Zone C describes violence, disorientation and disillusionment. It tells of men and women trapped by time and space, of a dystopian, unwanted and undesirable society that, with its disharmony, assumes almost catastrophic dimensions. But when describing the ruins of abandonment, urban segregation, the general condition of housing and social exclusion of the Parisian banlieus, Niklas Goldbach—who normally focuses his work on the contradictions between the public and the private as well as on the environment and public spaces—does it discreetly, in an almost imperceptible way. The almost invisible touch, with which the nine buildings of the banlieus are described, will inevitably require reflection. It forces the viewers to get closer, to squeeze their eyes, to focus attention on the delicate, almost Flemish-like, design, so that the deafening silence of the cement suburbs, their degradation and the indigence of the inhabitants—who have no possibility of social rehabilitation—remain in our minds."
Sarah Galmuzzi (2008)

Co-Produced by Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris