Marie-Pierre DieterléCité gagarine 1961-2020

“Marie-Pierre Dieterlé began surveying the cité Gagarine in 2009. Built in 1961 in Ivry-sur-Seine, it has become an emblem of the red suburbs and a showcase for the French Communist Party, of which Ivry was the historic stronghold. It was the beginning of social housing full of hope and utopia.
Entire families were able to leave the shantytowns to benefit from a minimum rental: a flat with hot water, toilets and integrated heating. In June 1963, the visit of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin helped to forge the myth of a city like no other. In the general jubilation, and under bouquets of flowers, the Soviet cosmonaut planted a tree in memory of his visit…
Then, like many housing estates in the Paris suburbs, the dream cracked. In the 1990s, the Gagarin housing estate was classified as a sensitive urban zone (ZUS). This urban policy label, which was supposed to give priority to these areas, became the stigma of social, economic and geographical segregation.
Demolition was gradually imposed. All the families had to be rehoused.
In 2017, there were only about a hundred occupied dwellings left out of the 380 on the estate. Faced with this inexorable end, Marie-Pierre Dieterlé proposed to the Maison de quartier Gagarine and the city of Ivry-sur-Seine an artistic accompaniment based on photographic workshops with the residents with a view to a giant exhibition on the façade of the building.
It was at this point that she realised to what extent the residents were experiencing the loss of their housing estate as a painful step.

Everything was going to disappear. As a photographer, she felt the need to remember. For two years, she wandered through the long, half-empty corridors, looking for faces to immortalise. Then she followed the stages of ecological deconstruction by nibbling away at the building until the last red brick disappeared.”