detour
The public transportation system has always been part of our experience of the city. Every day, it sucks in hundreds of thousands of people and then releases them to the four corners of the urban fabric. But the health crisis has taken over public space, everyone's space, and made it completely alien; it has turned public transit into a place to be avoided. In doing so, it has also reinforced a tendency to see the city as a place to flee, a place that is too hostile. Occupying urban space became a risk not to be taken.
Covid-19 has asserted its own spatiality. Between new limits, physical constraints and social distancing, it has provoked a distancing. Disconnected, isolated, we have lost sight of the city and its inhabitants. While our travels are reduced to the strict minimum, public transport, disenchanted, has lost its collective engine.
The question arises: How can we think about the bus route to revitalize our relationship with urban travel, to bridge the gap that has opened up between us and the city?
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
The jury was seduced by the clarity and strength of this anti-project. The proposal, entitled Détour, converts the rigidities of public transport, usually from station to predetermined station, into an unusual, indeterminate, unpredictable experience: getting on the bus without knowing where it will take you. The discovery of new parts of the city, new neighborhoods is made through the expectation of the unexpected. The straight line is not a quality, only the drift - in the sense that it had with the theorists of Situationism - is combined with the detour. This proposal does not solve the problem of transportation, but increases it, so to speak, by creating new urban links. The idea is clear, well written and the collages or fake collages add to the qualities of the whole. Mobility is conceived here as a way of living together, and the time needed to use public transport opens up the unexpected and a new imaginary experience of public transport. Would public transport managers be able to accept such a simple and confusing proposal?
(From jury report)
