Pushing the door of the Croisille family apartment, in the Emile-Dubois estate, in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis), Asma Kifia whispers and pretends to be walking on tiptoe. “It is 6 am, everyone still has to sleep, we will enter slowly”, slips us the young guide. In the dining room, a table covered with a lace tablecloth and a large sideboard. “The father, Jacques, a specialized worker at Baccarat, will soon be leaving for work, continues Asma Kifia. The mother, Jacqueline, will soon wake up their three children… ”
Welcome to the “HLM life” exhibition, which traces the fate of a family who lived in the bar from 1957, the year it was built, to 2012. The journeys of three other families, the Di Meo, Marie and Soukouna, are also staged on the floor below.
A promise of a better life
At the origin of these reconstructions presented at 8, allée Charles-Grosperrin, in the “city of 800”, in Aubervilliers, until June 30, 2022, a gang of thirty, mostly history and geography teachers in the Seine -St Denis. A visit to Tenement Museum, New York, which practices a narrative sociology to tell the story of immigration, served as a trigger.
“At the time, it was luxury, it was Versailles! Before, I had lived for six years in a wooden hut without water. »Antoinette Gadea, resident since 1957
The friends then take it into their heads to reveal another side of the Parisian suburbs, through unique journeys and as many micro-stories. In 2014, they founded their Association for a Popular Housing Museum (Amulop) and knock on all doors to find a favorable ear.
In 2021, the Aubervilliers public housing office is lending them four apartments in the Grosperrin social housing bar. A city that is quite ordinary, which does not have the architectural originality of the neighboring Maladrerie or the city of Courtillères, in Pantin. The only distinctive sign: Everyone, a colorful puzzle imagined by the Chevalme sisters on the facade, crumbs of anonymous lives and an ode to diversity.
Amulop goes back in time, drawing on research carried out over a year by historian Muriel Cohen, funded by the Convergences Migrations Institute. In 1957, when the Croisilles left an unhealthy slum for a brand new three-room apartment of 51 square meters, the city sounded like a promise of a better life. The youngest of the family, Béatrice Campo, remembers it as a golden age. “It is among my best memories, we all knew each other, there was a village spirit”, confides on the phone the retiree, who now lives in Agen.
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