Drancy la muette

Drancy la muette is a cross-disciplinary project that brings together photography, archives, text, and drawing to question a specific heritage space in the Paris region that is emblematic of French urbanism: the Cité de la Muette in Drancy.

Claire Angelini and Yannick Haenel walk through the city and make the documents and places talk. During these nightmarish strolls, they reconstitute the repressed History and crack the facade of a smooth and arranged story.

“This is a rather special history book. The facts, the dates, the archives are not enough: something opens up these temporalities that we have not lived. History is alive, and our bodies carry intimate perceptions of the past; they are the ones that shape every moment of our present. Look at these images, open your eyes to the silent Drancy. Do you think that this place does not speak, that the walls are silent, the past silent, the present indecipherable?
Listen to these images: then you will see.”