Mosques and mediation

Abstract

How can we work in a minefield when the unease is palpable and the vocabulary is warlike: privatisation, invasion of public space, communitarianism, overflow, risk of contagion of the public space by religion? How can we overcome the categories or the negative imaginary that opens up when we address the question of the mosque? By seizing the singularity of the mosque project.
A mosque is a place where we do not know in advance what it is, where the limits are blurred because its uses are variable and flexible according to the time of day or the year; a place that blurs borders and categories because what should be kept separate - the religious, the cultural, the educational, the sporting - is, on the contrary, intertwined; a place with a high potential for articulation that disturbs what should be taken for granted. Learning from this disorder rather than trying to channel it according to an ideal operating model, multiplying the possible connections between actors, between places, between uses, making other versions of the public space exist, 'mediating'... this is what has been experimented with in the Terrains d'architecture workshop and which is recounted in this article.