Murama

Do you want to discover the Fishing Walls of Montreuil (*), know the past and current memory of this exceptional heritage site, little known in the Seine Saint Denis?

The Murama application offers you a journey of photo exhibitions in Augmented Reality designed by Lolita Bourdet, the result of her immersion for four years aboard her Caravana Obscura, a caravan transformed into a giant film camera equipped with a development laboratory.

These exhibitions bring together the portraits born of the artist's encounters and the archives and contributions she has collected in order to make visible the multiplicity of communities that contribute to the identity of the place. Accompanied in this adventure by the association Les Cousines, the project is the winner of the AMI Mondes Nouveaux.

Discover the various multimedia content that the artist has distributed through 10 places of the Murs à Pêches, each marked at its entrance by a blue ceramic plate to be scanned from the Murama application.

The application then offers you two visit options:

1/ On site in immersive mode: Scan the drawing on the blue ceramic plate located at the entrance to the exhibition venue. Once the drawing is recognised, the experience begins: a soundtrack plays and a breadcrumb trail appears in the space of your camera to guide you to the first Augmented Reality content. The tour ends when you have viewed all content. The breadcrumb disappears and a notification offers to direct you to the next exhibition.

2/ On site or remotely in consultation mode: a menu offers you access to the different elements of the project: presentation of Murama with site map and catalog of each exhibition, presentation of the Caravana Obscura with the possibility of registering for a workshop photo, presentations by the artist Lolita Bourdet, the Les Cousines association and the Mondes Nouveaux system.

By intermingling ancestral and innovative technologies, Lolita Bourdet here questions the issues of immateriality and formatting of contemporary photography, playing on the anachronistic aspect of images. By directing the perception of visitors towards a grammar of the visible and the invisible, spaces of junctions are created which sensitively address the paradox of mutations, the preservation of heritage and the memory of the inhabitants.

(*) Located to the east of Paris, the Murs à Pêches de Montreuil form a labyrinth of gypsum walls oriented North-South on which fruit trees were cut into espaliers. Returning the heat of the sun at night, the walls make it possible to produce varieties of fruit usually reserved for the mild climates of the south of France. In the 17th century, the site occupied 320 hectares and produced 17 million fruits annually. While fishing in Montreuil became world famous, the activity gradually ceased during the industrial era, leaving many plots abandoned, polluted by neighboring factories or destroyed for the benefit of urban development.

During the 1980s, the Gypsy communities of Montreuil found refuge in the plots that were still vacant and associations of local residents campaigned to have the site classified. Of the remaining 35 hectares, 8.5 hectares are now protected. Many collectives are establishing themselves in solidarity dynamics, particularly around permaculture and reuse. Bordering the city of Bel-Air, they now form an open-air laboratory for ecological, cultural and social experiments, but are also currently plagued by development projects that are worrying their occupants, a harbinger of inevitable gentrification.