Unlike the Machine à habiter series, of which this new work forms a part, this installation operates several shifts. We are no longer dealing with the projection of fantasized spaces, nor with the suggestive materialization of ideas in the form of models, as in Machine à habiter no.1 and no.3, nor with the reappropriation of an existing space diverted from its original function — a bus stop — in the manner of a ready-made, as in Machine à habiter no.2, but rather with an operative structure, at full scale, within which I actually work.

There is therefore not only a change of scale, but also a change of status: the installation is no longer the representation of a constraint, but the very apparatus through which this constraint is applied and experienced over time. Where the model proposed a possibility, a potential mode of organizing space and bodies, the structure here becomes a real framework for activity, an environment put to the test. In other words, one moves from mental projection to practice, from model to performance: it is no longer a matter of depicting a workspace, but of actually working within the space produced by the work, of making this working situation the very core of the installation.

Where the previous pieces questioned habitation, the standardization of ways of living within the current capitalist framework, and the violence embedded in certain functional conceptions of space, this work shifts the question toward labour, an equally symbolic — if not even more symbolic — site of the violence exercised upon individuals. It is no longer simply a matter of thinking abstractly about how a body inhabits a space, but of observing how it holds itself there, disciplines itself there, produces there, and conforms to an organization of time and gesture.

This shift brings the installation closer to what Michel Foucault describes as a disciplinary apparatus: a material and symbolic arrangement that distributes positions, regulates circulation, makes certain gestures likely and others more difficult, and produces “docile” bodies through the repetition of micro-constraints. The workspace established here does not merely frame the body; it forms it, shapes it, renders it legible and exploitable. By placing myself within it, by actually working in it, the work becomes a disciplinary apparatus in the Foucauldian sense: a place where, on a small scale, the daily fabrication of a subject by the space surrounding it is replayed.

This logic also extends and displaces the one developed by Le Corbusier when he sought to transform living spaces, and more broadly the city itself, into standardized modules oriented toward production, making the house a “machine for living” and the city an apparatus for managing flows and behaviours. In seeking to calibrate space according to an abstract, standardized body — as exemplified by the Modulor — architectural functionalism anticipates the contemporary rationalization of workstations: measured ergonomics, optimization of gestures, reduction of “losses” of time or energy. Here, the installation takes up this tradition while displacing it: the workstation is treated as a kind of micro-urbanism, a cell in which logics of standardization, control, and performance are condensed, yet confronted with a singular, situated body that never fully coincides with the model.

In this sense, the work operates a double movement. On the one hand, it inherits from the architectural and urban model: it proposes an arrangement, a scheme for organizing space, a spatial hypothesis concerning the way a body, reduced to its productive function (the production of wealth) according to capitalist logic, could or should work. On the other hand, it exceeds this model by constituting itself as a continuous performance: a duration of presence, gesture, and fatigue within this apparatus, laying bare the gap between the promise of efficiency and the lived experience of constraint. It is precisely within this gap — between the project and its use, between the machine as conceived and the machine as inhabited, between the abstract body of the Modulor and the concrete body of the worker — that the work situates itself. It does not merely represent a constraint: it puts it to the test.