The working-class neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris, known as 'banlieue', are often defined as problem neighbourhoods, something that has deeper and politically complex causes. The way these neighborhoods are organized and represented contribute to a process of exclusion, isolation and stigmatisation. At the same time, counterculture, practices of emancipation and resistance exist in these neighbourhoods. One of these is LREEM (La Revolution est en Marche), about which Erika Roux made a video work, Aujourd'hui on est là. In collaboration with these groups, she wanted to delve further into collective struggle and the relationship between urban organization and the formation of subjectivities, in order to find out together how people can resist these large, exclusive mechanisms. How can you regain control and create a collective body in search of change? Her R&D plan involves a theoretical and historical investigation of the Parisian suburban space and its neocolonial aspects, together with urban theories and notions of social space and the right to the city. She is also concerned with how such local organizations (also outside Paris) can redefine the stories about areas and stigmatized inhabitants: “Territorial reclamation cannot do without a new appropriation of its representation.”

Roux studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Piet Zwart Institute and was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. In addition to her individual artistic practice, she is co-founder of WET, a Rotterdam video art collective. Working primarily with video, she uses the camera to create a specific bond with individuals, a group of people or a community, exploring collaborations and political struggles that question power structures. The R&D committee believes that the artist has an interesting vision of the theme that she is raising, with awareness about the role of art in this, with which she also deepens her own practice.

In short, Roux wants to investigate the potential of a publication, archiving and oral history as a platform, in order to circulate and register the polyphony and invisible aspects of such local practices. To this end, at the end of 2021, she started reading theory about urban space and notions of empowerment and resistance in relation to public space. She does this collectively: she is in continuous dialogue with different members of the organization, collects testimonials to form an oral history, and works on an essay. LREEM member Cosimo Lisi supervises her in the theoretical research and writing, Hadama Traoré, also a member of LREEM, is looking with Roux at the possibilities of translating the trajectory into a visual archive in the course of 2022.