After Scripture in 2023 the theme of the Académie des beaux-arts architecture competition, is Migrate.

You may consider this theme in its most diverse meanings, as long as they are reasoned.

To migrate is to move living beings, ideas and things. It's the act of leaving one situation for another, one place for another. As a principle of transfer, migration brings about transformations - biological, genetic, cultural and intellectual. Concrete as well as metaphorical, synonymous with mass dislocation and misery, it is also synonymous with mixing, “optimistic mobility” [1]and vivacity.

As in other periods of human history, migration has become a condition of life: an intransitive verb that speaks of transfer. Whether undergone or chosen, sometimes unfinished or brutally interrupted, said transfers are permanent and ephemeral anchors. Status multiply and intertwine: refugee, migrant, displaced and exile. Regarded with violence or hospitality, with compassion, indifference or contempt, these people on the move remain unintegrated by institutional power structures, stigmatized by established orders.

Migration is exhausting, but it can also be emancipating.

The temporality of what migrates, human or other, is the present. The urgency of survival frees us from the past and dispenses with the future. To migrate is to practice geography in the moment. Transitions and displacements create “frontier places, marked by the uncertainty of the moment and the immediate future” [2]. The frontier is no longer a line, but thickens and becomes a place, thus discarding the rhetoric of rootedness and attachment to one's origins, or to the land.

“The voice that trembles within me is the voice of the frontier”[3]. If we are willing to think of them in a new light, border crossings appear as modes of life capable of undoing established categories, inventing imaginations and “identity(ies) in transit” [4]. Migration explodes the binary oppositions that have forged the life and knowledge of modernity: it requires complex thinking, posing challenges that are as much political as intellectual.

Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, Benjamin Lafore, Sébastien Martinez-Barat

[1] Edward W. Saïd, “Movements and Migrations”, Culture and Imperialism, New York, Vintage Book editions, 1994, p.332.

[2] Michel Agier, Les migrants et nous, Comprendre Babel, Paris, CNRS éditions, 2026, p.53

[3] Paul B. Preciado, An Appartment on Uranus, Chronicles of the Crossing, semiotext(e), 2020, p. 134

[4]Ibid., p.173

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Concours d'architecture de l'Académie des beaux-arts, Prix Charles Abella Édition 2025

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