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In 2026, Grégory Chatonsky presents the fourth and final chapter of La ville qui n’existait pas, a project that imagines the past, present, and future of an alternative Le Havre using Artificial Intelligence.
This unprecedented project has unfolded over four years across the city of Le Havre, notably through twenty-four monumental banners displayed throughout the city, three series of 25,000 unique and numbered postcards, a film, and two installations.
For the period from 2050 to 2612, Grégory Chatonsky envisions a telephone booth inspired by the French model “La Parisienne” and by the architectural principles of Auguste Perret, prominent in Le Havre’s city center. A symbolic object of the 20th century and an emblem of modernity that gradually disappeared from cities from the mid-2000s onward, the telephone booth appears both strange to younger generations and familiar to older ones.
Fully functional, it features a purple handset shaped like a hand, allowing the public to listen to stories generated from the voices of Le Havre residents, synthesized using Artificial Intelligence. The work questions both our relationship to technology and to collective memory: what constitutes a narrative? What makes a city? These stories are neither entirely documentary nor purely fictional—they form a possible, recomposed, and augmented memory.
This work was supported by the cultural and music center Le CEM and the association Les Cueilleurs d’Histoires, which contributed to recording the voices of residents.
