Hijacking the Seine: Stéphane Thidet’s Détournement (2018)

2.1 The River Seine: Topography, Geography, and History

7Within the Conciergerie, the winding water trough in Détournement makes visual the more commonplace translation of the title as “diversion” or “rerouting” (CNRTL). More importantly, its serpentine path mirrors the River Seine’s meandering topography along its 482-mile course. Beginning with its source nineteen miles northwest of Dijon in northeastern France, the Seine flows north and then west through Paris to the English Channel. For our purposes, the five-part topographic division of the Seine Basin (that dominates northern France) helps us to focus on the river’s mid-section—the Traversée de Paris (the Paris waterway)—also known as the lowland Paris Basin (Berg).

8From the beginning of the third century BCE, the Paris Basin became the economic, administrative, and strategic military center of the Seine Basin. Its fertile soil provided for agricultural development, while its access to the sea enabled mercantile exchange. The River Seine was easily navigated by settlers and invaders arriving from the North Sea by way of the English Channel. Settlements in this region began with the Celtic Parisii tribe, around 250 BCE, followed by the Gauls who settled in the middle of the Seine, known as the Île de la Cité and the future location of the Conciergerie (Horne 1–3).

9The Paris Basin was also the site of imperial and tribal battles. In 52 BCE, the Roman Army, led by Julius Caesar, conquered the River Seine and the Île de la Cité from the Gauls (Jones 6–7), creating a settlement (called Lutetia) on the river’s left bank. In 508 CE, Clovis I, the first French king and founder of the Merovingian dynasty, invaded the Roman settlement, made Paris the kingdom’s capital (Jones 24–5), and established his royal residence on the western end of the Île de la Cité, occupying the Roman fortress and the Prefect’s residence (Gabourd 38, 50, 56). During the Middle Ages, the Conciergerie was added to this complex.³ In the mid-to-late ninth century, Vikings twice sailed up the River Seine to plunder Paris, succeeding the first time and failing the second (Jones 28–9). Except for one hundred years after Louis XIV moved the court to Versailles (1682) and until the French Revolution (1789), Paris remained the administrative capital of France, and the Île de la Cité became the capital’s administrative center.

10Viewed in this historical context, Thidet’s Détournement diverts more than the river water into the Conciergerie. As the Seine is pumped up from the Pont au Change, and then arched over the narrow Quai de l’Horloge to enter the medieval building, its liquid medium makes present an infinite spatial continuum and a geographic nexus that extends to the sea. Coincidently, as the river enters the building as a waterfall, and then flows through the wooden troughs, its gentle currents advance a historical dimension that intertwines with the Conciergerie’s history.

2.2 The Conciergerie: From Palace to Prison

11As noted, the Conciergerie was built as an extension of the Merovingian palace, known as the Palais de la Cité. Beginning with the Capetian king, Hugh Capet, and continuing during the reign of the medieval kings (from the tenth through fourteen centuries), the palace was extensively fortified and expanded to include the Palais de Justice, the Sainte-Chapelle, and the upper-level Grande Salle (Great Hall) and the lower-level Salle des Gens d’Armes (CMN [En.]). In the late fourteenth century, Charles V transferred the royal residence to the Louvre Palace (now the Louvre Museum). While the medieval palace continued to serve an administrative function and continued to serve the judiciary and French Parliament, the absentee king appointed a steward or “concierge” to administer the building, from which the Conciergerie derives its name (CMN [En.]). Notably, at the end of the fourteenth century part of the building was converted into a prison (CMN [Fr.] 5).

12Other than the Sainte-Chapelle, the lower parts of the palace are all that remain of the medieval royal residence. The three rooms through which Thidet channels the Seine’s flow (fig. 3)⁴ were reserved for the king’s guard and the staff that served the needs of the king and his family, totaling around 2,000 people (CMN [En.]). The kitchens were used to prepare meals for this entourage. Supplies would be brought in directly by boat, just as Détournement delivers the Seine through the kitchen’s five-meter-high window (figs. 1, 3). The Salle des Gens d’Armes, composed of four naves with ribbed vaulting supported by Gothic piers,⁵ was one of the largest halls in medieval Europe; it was used as the staff’s dining room, for royal banquets, and for judicial proceedings (CMN [En.]; CMN [Fr.] 4).⁶ Détournement makes its grand entry into this monumental room, cascading river water into a circular tank with a deafening din (fig. 2). Channeling the water into troughs one meter off the ground, Détournement then gently and quietly meanders through the piers and turns to enter the Salle des Gardes (fig. 4). Built together with the Salle des Gens d’Armes, this guardroom was an antechamber to the Grande Salle above (CMN [En.]). Here, the river trough is elevated to the eight-meter height of the guardroom’s windows. The river water then makes its grand exit as another waterfall, cascading between two medieval towers,⁷ to return, via a moat, to its fluvial source (fig. 5).

13It was during the French Revolution that the Revolutionary Tribunal moved to the Salle des Gens d’Armes (CMN [Fr.] 4). But it was the prison that made the Conciergerie legendary in modern times. It became the central penitentiary of a network of prisons throughout Paris both for common criminals and for political prisoners. Marie-Antoinette counts among its most famous prisoners. Following the Tribunal’s scandalously criminalized trials,⁸ the guilty prisoners were loaded onto carts in the courtyard and brought to guillotines located throughout Paris, an ordeal for which the Conciergerie was nicknamed “the antechamber to the guillotine” (CMN [Fr.] 6; Wilson et al. 467).

14The prison’s notoriety notwithstanding, Thidet’s Détournement turns away from the dark corridor leading to the prison cells. As he stated in our email correspondence: “I only worked in the rooms where the activity was to make la Conciergerie work (for the residents): The Kitchen, la salle des Gardes and la salle des Gens d’Armes. I didn’t want to work in the jail cells: the history and facts were too heavy, too strong to react with it.”⁹ In bypassing the prison, Thidet instead attended to another, more recent historical marker inside the Conciergerie: the 1910 flood level etched on a stone pier inside the Salle des Gens d’Armes (fig. 6).

2.3 The 1910 Flood: Collision of the Seine and the Conciergerie

15As Thidet recounted in the exhibition wall text, the invasion of the River Seine into the Conciergerie during the 1910 Flood became one of his inspirations for Détournement. The 1910 Flood was catastrophic for the city of Paris. In December 1909, the Seine’s water level had risen and then receded due to heavy rains in the Paris Basin (Jackson 31). However, on January 21, the river began to rise more rapidly than normal. Over the next seven days, thousands of Parisians evacuated their homes as water infiltrated residential and civic buildings, factories and shops, and streets throughout the city. It affected 150,000 people, flooded 20,000 buildings, shutting down much of basic infrastructure, including the Métro, train, and electrical and gas lines, and overflowing sewers (Sumpf). To continue moving throughout the city, residents traveled by boat or across a series of wooden footbridges (passerelles) built by government engineers and civilians (Jackson 55).¹⁰ On January 28 the water reached its maximum height at 8.62 meters (28 feet) above its normal level (Journal des Débats 30). It was on this day that the River Seine breached the Conciergerie’s medieval hall and stained the stone pier in the Salle des Gens d’Armes. The river receded in the following days.

Fig. 6. La Conciergerie, Salle des Gens d’Armes medieval pillar with 1910 Flood watermark. Photo: author.

3.1 Word & Image: Semantics and Translation

17Before discussing Debord’s détournement in relation to Thidet’s artwork, a review of the semantics and translation of the nomenclature is in order. According to Ken Knabb, a primary translator of Debord’s texts, “the French word détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose” (Debord and Wolman, trans. n. 1). Each of these terms fits Thidet’s rerouting of the River Seine through the Conciergerie. However, Knabb cautions against the frequent translation of détournement simply as ‘diversion,’ “because of its more common meaning of idle entertainment” (Debord and Wolman, trans. n. 1), what Debord derides as “spectacle.”¹⁴

18Although Thidet’s Détournement is entertaining, his diversion of the Seine also invites critical engagement with historical, cultural, and environmental discourses. It is in this critical light that I prioritize the term hijacking to denote a more subversive (illegal) activity. To hijack is to unlawfully and forcefully intrude upon a space that is ‘legally’ off limits to seize someone/something that signifies a (desired) symbol of power (OED). As Thidet stated, the most important factor leading to re-inviting the Seine into the Conciergerie “was the fact that much of the history of this place is linked to confinement, detention, and all forms of isolation from the world” (Thidet Wall text). I argue that Thidet’s creative interventions—both conceptual and material détournements—support my interpretation of détournement as hijacking.

3.2 Détournement as Word and Image

19In their 1956 “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman introduced détournement as an ongoing critical activity performed within and directed against capitalist cultural practices. Conceived as an agent of mutation from within a culture, détournement is especially effective within the sphere of artistic production and appropriation.¹⁵ In 1957 Debord founded the Situationist International, and during the 1960s he led this group to disavow works of art and instead implement détournement as occupying, and thereby appropriating, public spaces for their street events or “situations.” For these events, the Situationists would “shake passers-by out of their conventional habits of looking and thinking” (Fineberg 343). For this study I have untethered Debord’s usage of détournement from the Situationist’s anti-capitalist rhetoric, regarding Debord as a cultural influencer. In doing so, I have found the practice of détournement, as an agent of cultural mutation or ‘misappropriation,’ to be more succinctly defined in Debord’s 1959 tract “Détournement as Negation and Prelude.” Here Debord proposed that détournement is an ongoing process that invites the re-use of cultural artifacts into new ensembles. To differentiate détournement from the avant-garde’s “reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble” (as with parody), Debord states “the two fundamental laws of détournement” as “the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element—which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense—and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect” (Debord 1959; emphasis added).¹⁶

20How are these two laws pertinent to Thidet’s Détournement? First, by presenting a historical monument and water as ready-made creative materials, Thidet’s installation circumvents the avant-garde’s parodic inversion or appropriation of “preexisting artistic elements.”¹⁷ In Thidet’s work, a parodic engagement with preexisting artistic conventions is deferred; the artist references and encodes ‘preexisting’ historical events, outside of their previous (if any) artistic representation. Second, by reconfiguring the Seine’s intrusion on the Conciergerie as an artistic intervention, Thidet temporarily hijacks these two elements’ “original sense.” Temporality is key here since I have just probed the historical and geographical meanings of the monument and the river. Yet, both Debord’s détournement and Thidet’s Détournement present the detourned elements, which comprise the new ensemble, as carriers of collective memory. As Debord and Wolman explain, the elements and their detourning must be simply exposed: “The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.” As a “general law,” they add, “Let us simply note that … this dependence on memory implies that one must determine one’s public before devising a détournement” (Debord and Wolman).

21Like the detourned elements that operate in Debord’s mutational processes, Thidet’s materials—the Conciergerie and the River Seine—cannot escape the spectators’ collective memory. Yet, his reductive presentation of both elements as ready-made materials and the supporting materials of wood, metal, and light render the ‘new ensemble’ with ostensible simplicity. At the same time, this simplicity highlights the mnemonic targets of Thidet’s hijackings: the river, the medieval building, and the flood that caused their original collision. Thidet further invoked Debord’s acts of detourning historically remembered elements in his response to my query: “It was important for me to propose another story of this monument which was a strong authority symbol, and terrible jail. Important to make something wild breaking in through the window and going back outside. The same need we have when we open the windows to change the air of a house.”¹⁸

3.3 Hijacking The River Seine and the Conciergerie

22We can now align elements of Thidet’s Détournement specifically with détournement as a hijacking process. In doing so, it is possible to track Thidet’s tactics along multiple axes that disrupt both the River Seine and the Conciergerie.

23In the first instance, Thidet hijacks the River Seine as a destructive force by diverting it into the Conciergerie “d’une maniere assez domestiquée en proposant un canal” (Thidet and Samsoen 11; in a rather domesticated way by providing a channel). This domestication occurs when the water flows through the “working” spaces of the medieval palace—kitchen, dining hall, and guardroom. The artist further suggested domestication and the stripping away of the catastrophic event of the 1910 Flood when he compared his monumental diversion of the Seine with child’s play: “Like a lot of children, I used to turn away the path of small streams [with pebbles and sticks].”¹⁹

24The artist also hijacks the River Seine as a battlefield, a trade route, and a commodity to create an ephemeral aesthetic experience. As the river water courses through the Salle des Gens d’Armes, it coalesces as an idyllic medium for contemplation and wonder. The gentle rhythm of the water currents, the sound of its flow, and the light reflections captured on the surface and on the surrounding stones create a sensorial universe isolated from the outside world.

25In a reversal of the above, Thidet’s hijacking draws attention as well to the river’s fragile ecosystem that comprises the River Seine basin and the Paris traversée in particular. Signage placed throughout Détournement forbids the visitor from touching or ingesting the contaminated river water. These signs provide a harrowing reminder of the river’s long history as a dumping ground for human and manufactured waste, toxic seepage from transported materials and river vehicles, and pleasure-seekers’ trash.²⁰ Thidet’s own words suggest how his river hijacking also diverts the visitor’s attention from imaginative wonder to critical self-reflection: “Actually, the ‘Détournement’ was also to play a childhood gesture as an adult: the meaning then becomes political and poetic.”²¹

26At the same time, by reuniting the River Seine with the Conciergerie, Thidet inevitably hijacks the medieval monument for our contemporary moment, appropriating the space for both his artistic creation and his historical intervention. He first hijacks the Conciergerie by “re-inviting” the Seine back into its confines. In doing so, he breaks through its physical inertia and its history “linked to confinement, detention, and all forms of isolation from the world.” As he explains, “The installation thus suggests extreme communication with the outside: a project that goes beyond walls and connects with a powerful living external element. The outside world once again invites itself inside” (Thidet Wall text).

27As previously noted, Thidet also hijacks the Conciergerie’s connection to confinement and detention by diverting the river troughs away from the jail cells. He thereby signals a metaphorical human escape by way of the river’s escape through the guardroom window and back into the River Seine bed.

28Moreover, Thidet’s ultimate hijacking of the Conciergerie is directly aligned with the Debordian definition of détournement: “to turn something aside from its normal course or purpose” (Debord and Wolman, trans. n. 1). Within this alignment, Thidet turns the Conciergerie into a stage set for a poetics of play. That is, Thidet plays with a series of opposites that flow through the course of Détournement and temporarily rid the building and the river of their historical, utilitarian, and commercial functions. These dichotomies suggest open-ended play: open/closed, inside/outside, water/stone, gentle/forceful, impermeable/porous, permanence/change, stasis/movement, fixity/continuum.