I discovered the “Comico/l'Anti-squat” when a friend invited me there for a coffee. Since the first time, the structure and the skeleton of this building, its geographic position and its old functions fascinated me. Its corridors and their innumerable doors appeared to me like an image of the places in the mind you lose yourself and bury your memories.

 In this space, different temporalities meet each other and are intimately entangled. For a period, the Comico and its inhabitants were a singulary entity. Like a heart and its body. When one disapears, the experience ends. The space of the film and the proximity I have with the tenants offers me access to their intimacy in what it reveals of compromises in such an architecture. These corridors, these halls, these undergrounds, were theirs for two years. This opportunity to talk about it is an opportunity for grief. A time and space to figure out what what worked, what were their limits, where they succeeded, where they failed. Their words answer each other, complete each other or contradict each other.

​Through this ephemeral experience, I became aware a form of impermanence, the degradation of the environment inside which we all find ourselves. Even if this place will disappear in the future, its carcass will subsist, while the people who occupied it will leave. Despite this, these people gave to this place some human warmth and a kindness not so easy to find inside a big city. It's because they where here, in this location that these moment exists. To me, they are like small bubble of life persisting inside a concrete universe, dull and static.

​Behind these walls and these faces, I perceive mirrors, violences and paradoxes of the environment in which we find ourselves : metaphors for the gentrification of the city and a society in decline. By acknowledging the illusional and ephemeral aspect of this way of living, I'm questioning what's left from such an experience and our capacity to transcend or accept this decline.

Credits

Direction  - Deborah Ruffato

Editing - Deborah Ruffato / Mira Matthew

Sound Edit & Mixing - Christophe Albertijn

Sound Design - Deborah Ruffato

Colorgrading - Antoine Urban

Production- Nekomata