Don’t look for the Feast of The They in La Courneuve: this year, she had to leave her stronghold in the north of the capital, and even Seine-Saint-Denis. Cranes are building the media village for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on part of the Vents area that it has occupied for twenty years.
After having visited all that Ile-de-France has of sufficiently large and accessible sites – racetracks, leisure bases, aerodromes, woods, fields – to host concerts, debates and political meetings for three days, the festival management has taken up residence on a former military air base in Essonne, thirty-five kilometers south of Paris.
Between 300,000 and 350,000 people are expected until Sunday, September 11, on land shared by Brétigny-sur-Orge and Le Plessis-Pâté. At the end of the 87e edition, the figures will be scrutinized to assess who will have lost their way, and how many new neighbors will have responded. Then the four hundred stands will be folded up and the power lines and poles dismantled so that, in less than two weeks, the meadow and the XXL airstrip – three kilometers long and 100 meters wide, the largest of Europe in its construction – return to a normal course of life. Or almost.
Because, since the end of the 1990s, no plane has taken off from base 217, where the greatest pages of French aeronautical history have been written: first jet plane, breaking the sound barrier. The flight test center and then the Air Force left the premises, leaving the keys to new owners who did not dismantle anything from the runways, hangars, fifty-year-old offices.
On the other hand, they added their touch to it. Movie sets – a 19th century market halle century or a Gallic village – thus sometimes arise from tall grass. Golden copper sheets cover the old radar protection dome. On the track, drones and sand yachts pass each other. At the end, looking south, next to the greenhouses where tomatoes and peppers grow in profusion, a warehouse houses an army of robots and employees who prepare packages day and night.
Backwards
Curious assemblies, curious mixtures. However, everything is deliberate, skilfully thought out, even theorized. It’s because here, for around ten years, on one of the last urbanizable surfaces in Ile-de-France, a special development experiment has been carried out, including the arrival of the Fête de The They marks a new stage.
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