'We Must Build Huts': Jean-Marie Gleize's Temporary Dwellings

In 2017 the French writer Jean-Marie Gleize insisted: ‘Make sure that the hut doesn’t turn into a residence’ (Gleize 2017: 386). Huts are central to two publications in a series on which Gleize has been working since the 1980s, books that develop what he calls ‘post-poetry’, or non-lyrical writing incorporating reflection, memoir and documents, in which writing operates as investigation rather than as expression. This article focuses in particular on the seventh volume of the series to date, Le Livre des cabanes (The Book of Huts) (2015), with reference also to the preceding work, Tarnac, un acte préparatoire (Tarnac, a Preparatory Act) (2011), alongside a published interview and article. I read those texts in relation to Doreen Massey’s argument in For Space (2005) that space should be understood as the intersection of multiple trajectories, and refer also to a recent essay by Marielle Macé, Nos cabanes (Our Huts) (2021), which reflects on collectivity from an ecological perspective. Macé mentions Gleize as well as other writers who have explored dwelling and she insists on dwelling as praxis, as do Tim Ingold (1995), Massey, and Kristin Ross in her study of the importance of the Paris Commune for subsequent thought (2015). The article argues that for Gleize, huts are pockets of communal resistance, both literal and metaphorical structures that act as barricades to the incursions of authority and provisional places of welcome that are dismantled and reconstructed elsewhere. It considers how his writing might exemplify and encourage non-hierarchical, hospitable dwellings and argues that the form of his books – montages of fragmented material, including photographs as well as text taken from a variety of sources – shows a new kind of dwelling in action: a constantly-renegotiated collective that engages with the world outside while resisting many of society’s structures.