Can we produce an alternative story to the social stigma of the outskirts of major cities ? At the crossroads of popular history and urban arts, the exhibition of the National Museum of Immigration offers a reinforced reading of the suburbs.
The exhibition “ Darling suburbs »He is held at the Museum of the History of Immigration from April 11 to August 17, 2025. Aleteïa, aka Émilie Garnaudartist, and Emmanuel Bellangerhistorian, research director at Cnrs And director of the Center for Social History of Contemporary Worlds, present the project.
Entrance doors on large cities, the suburbs are perceived through often reducing prisms. The term itself covers a great diversity of realities often reduced to the opposition between so-called peaceful residential cities and large sets long decried. The suburbs are however a reflection of a social and cultural wealth, constitutive of the history of France.
Bringing together more than 200 archive documents, paintings, installations, videos, photographs, testimonies, the exhibition explores these darling suburbs as places of memory and transmission. From the red belt to “ suburbs »By including the construction of large complexes, the exhibition shows a multiplicity of points of view from the end of XIXe century to today.
Aleteïa, née Emilie Garnaud In 1979, was a French visual artist from street art. Carried by collectives Vao And A NIGHTshe began to install her constellations in Paris, in the 2000s. Her in situ interventions were carried out mainly in adhesive, with a aerosol bomb, in collage. From her first years of street art and the scene graffiti for the late 1990s in which she bathed, she kept the obsession of the archetype recognizable at the first glance, the taste for the repetition of the taggueur, the need to explore territories, to move forward on the fringes, in touch with the world around us.
Following her deep convictions concerning the place of the artist in society, and that of the street artist in particular, she decided to go and practice her art in the Parisian suburbs. She has been working since 2007 with the metamorphosis association as part of contemporary art courses Lodges In the Cité de la Grande Borne in Grigny (91) in which she has since installed her workshop.
Emmanuel Bellanger is a historian, research director of Cnrs and director of the Center for Social History of Contemporary Worlds (Chs – Umr 8058) from Paris 1 University – Campus Condorcet.
His work focuses on the social history of the suburbs, metropolises and urban policies. They are part of a multidisciplinary approach to urban studies.
– Read an extract from the catalog on Metropolitical.
Shooting & editing: A. Suhamy