“A Tightrope Walker’s Performance: Remembering the Past and Welcoming the Future of the Assas Tower in Montpellier”

On this Sunday, May 7, in clear weather and not very windy, a tightrope walker walked on a wire, in the heart of the Mosson, formerly called La Paillade, the most popular district of Montpellier. In the air, in front of the crowd, he left the Assas tower to join that of Pic Saint-Loup. An artistic manifestation desired by the city, before the first, the highest residential tower in Montpellier, is destroyed at the end of 2024, fifty-four years after its construction.

To symbolize this change of time, the tower of Assas takes on a particular look: a huge tarpaulin shows a man, from behind, a suitcase in his hand. The reading can be double: a man who arrives and settles down in 1969. Or the same man, leaving the premises today.

In the meantime, this tower had in the 1990s more than 600 inhabitants spread over its 22 floors, most of them from Morocco. In 2009, it welcomed more, probably 800, in sometimes overcrowded apartments, in degraded premises, with the three elevators often broken down and water cuts which punctuate daily life. In 2015, about twenty women, inhabitants of the tower, organized themselves as a collective and asked for a solution themselves, even if it meant considering destruction.

It is obviously important for the future: the town hall of Montpellier decides, in response, on the demolition, in agreement with the inhabitants. Today, she wants them to seize this event to remember what they experienced there.

memory work

And in fact, the tarp is only the most visible part of a vast project that involved the population. The town hall had launched a call for applications to find the team that would manage to create a project integrating the inhabitants. The winning application allowed, before the installation of the tarpaulin, a work of memory with the former residents of the Assas tower.

At the helm, Ipeicc, a well-established popular education association in La Paillade, and Nourdine Bara, a resident who has become a must in the district: it is he who regularly organizes “agoras”, offering residents the opportunity to come and talk about the book. they are reading, or communities to come and renew the dialogue after a period of tension in the neighbourhood. It was also to him that the centenary sociologist Edgar Morin spoke when he wanted to come and talk to young people from the neighborhood, still in an open-air agora in front of the halls, in October 2022. Finally, the third partner in the team, Al, the artist who designed and produced the tarpaulin.

You have 45.16% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.