The La Cloche initiative is organizing “Our Own Olympic Games” in Parisian locations with exclusionary street furniture.
Photo: The Cloche
Mockery is not the worst way to fight against the injustices of this world. It is free, can have a liberating effect and, in the best case, can get others to join in the mockery. The latest Instagram campaign by La Cloche (German: the bell or, pejoratively, “bum life”), a French aid organization for homeless people, uses this communicative potential to draw attention to anti-homeless furniture in Paris.
“Although the city of Paris issued a ban on the installation of exclusionary street furniture in 2020, we have noticed that the number of such furniture has been steadily increasing in recent years, while at the same time more and more benches are disappearing from public spaces,” explains Goli Moussavi, the president of La Cloche Île-de-France, the content hook of the campaign with the hashtag #StopMobilierExcluant. While Paris welcomes the whole world for the Olympic Games and presents itself as a good host, the city is becoming increasingly uncomfortable for homeless and poor people. A year ago, the 33-year-old said, people were wondering how to draw media attention to this cynical double standard. And so mockery came into play, or rather, the Games, or as Moussavi mischievously states: “Humor has always worked very well at La Cloche so far.”
Across France, 40 permanent employees work for La Cloche, and there are also 300 volunteers who have their own experiences on the street or in precarious housing situations. In the spring, some of the Parisian volunteers took on the role of athletes for a photo shoot. Amrit and Jacques played table tennis against each other, Gilles practiced mini golf and Franck did gymnastics. The venues: absurd examples of what is called exclusive furniture. The photos were then uploaded to Instagram with explanatory texts. One of the pictures shows two women bending over in the best low start position getting ready for a sprint. The starting blocks are large, gray prisms that are attached to the ground in front of a house entrance. They are intended to prevent a tent from being set up there. The caption reads: »To find inclusive street furniture, Christelle and Anna are always ready to sprint.«
While Paris welcomes the whole world, the city is becoming increasingly uncomfortable for the homeless.
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This “competition” began an outdoor press conference to which La Cloche had invited people at the beginning of June, a good eight weeks before the grand opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Around 50 interested people from the surrounding 11th arrondissement came, as well as journalists from the major left-wing newspapers “L’Humanité” and “Libération” and from the online magazine “Konbini”. “We organized our own Olympic Games,” Moussavi commented on the sporting awareness tour against spikes on the ground, huge vases in front of house entrances, individual chairs, short benches with backrests in the middle and missing seating. The joint penalty shootout at the back of a bus stop at the Place de la Bastille, which had been converted into a goal, was the highlight of the afternoon.
Konbini’s video was viewed over 50,000 times on Instagram. Moussavi said: “Suddenly half of France saw my face.” However, the campaign has not really gone viral; there are only 18 posts under the hashtag #StopMobilierExcluant so far. But Moussavi does not see the initiative as a failure: “Of course we had hoped that a few more people would upload photos of exclusive street furniture under the hashtag, but with all the media coverage we have achieved our main goal.”
In order to not only draw more attention to all the anti-homeless furniture in Paris, but also to ensure its removal, La Cloche is currently in the process of turning to political decision-makers. They are currently advising those responsible who have promised to turn the newly built Olympic Village in the north of Paris into an inclusive urban district with social housing. And La Cloche also wants to work with green and left-wing politicians in the future. Some have expressed interest in running in the Paris local elections in two years with a campaign against exclusive and for inclusive urban furniture. One thing is certain: their campaign is likely to be more humorous than that of their political opponents.
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