The Fraternal Union of Metalworkers (UFM) created, during the period of the Front Populair (1936-38), the House of Metalworkers, an emblematic place in Paris for the labor movement. In the 2000s UFM was forced to sell part of his house that was transformed into a cultural establishment of the City of Paris.
To show solidarity with this change and also to show their cultural engagement, UFM approached Mari Linnman in 2009 to work on the creation of a piece of art in relation to the cultural action of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT). They wanted to offer the city an emblematic work of art, able to evoke the history and affirm a vision for trade union action in terms of "solidarity and fraternity."

The artist Alain Bublex designed the work as street lighting, entitled "be useful (daily)." The work refers to the architecture and the history of the House of Metalworkers. Seven lighting equipment are fixed to the building facade. Each trapeze bar is individually designed by the artist and made by a metalworker, each lamp emits a particular quality of light. At nightfall, the articulated lamps lower to enlighten the passers-by. In the morning, they get up. Varied, disparate, heterogeneous and theatrical, the device provides a graphical element in day time and an atmosphere of intimacy at night.

Alain Bublex

Alternately urbanist, researcher and traveler, Alain Bublex experiments the idea of landscape in the city, and in architecture. Through his work, he sets up a dialogue between modernist utopias and their possible and/or imaginable adaptations to the current society, including interest on multifaceted ractices of popular culture.
Born in 1961, Alain Bublex was recently shown at the State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, MAMCO Geneva, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, ...