Christophe Meierhans
Europa 2030, a Roadmap
Published in Rekto:Verso magazine, March 2019
22 December 2029, R0, Anderlecht
The asphalt is patchy. Seems they take good care of it out here as well. These fixes look like teeth in an old mouth. A mouth which has eaten through a whole century, each generation of fillings testifing to a different time and state of dentistry. Except that it hasn’t been that long since they started using these strange materials for road repair. At the end of the day, the best way to fix asphalt still seems to be asphalt itself, nabbed from other less important roads.
It feels strange to be on the motorway. Strange too we still call it that. Walking along the junction to the silent E19 I realise how long it’s been since I was last so far from the centre. Turning around and looking back, the signs all point to Brussels. Just ten years ago, heading south on this side of the road would have been suicidal – wrong direction. The signs were meant for foward travel only. They thrusted people’s minds ahead in anticipation, to bypass the useless sitting time spent travelling between places.
A sudden, sense of loss. Like i’ve been away for much longer already. Every now and then a bike passes by, moving much faster than I can. Glad I didn’t take one though. That’ll be for the way back.
23 December 2029, Q8 Station, Thieu
A third query station. Quite some people here, more than in the previous ones. Most look like they’re just here to check whether their own question has found an answer. Or they’re placing a new one. I wonder how this is all supposed to work if no one bothers going through other people’s queries. I ask a man who stands up to leave after just 5 minutes. He’s in his sixties, lives a biking hour away in Soignies where he helps run the seed bank. A lot of work to do there, no time for general knowledge. Same for most people I guess. Some things are simply more urgent.
This station is well organised. It’s set up in the cafeteria of what used to be the service station, one of those that streches over the road, a bridge connecting both sides of the motorway. All queries are ordered by topic and all topics alphabetically. Each letter has a dedicated table, overlooking the road. Colored ribbons flagging the resolved questions are pinned to the pages.
I browse through the topics. Not many I feel competent enough to deal with. One thing I can contribute to, though: What is serial music? Once the ribbon is in place, I take note of a couple of other unanswered queries to take with me on the way, and I add my own. Who knows, someone might be able to answer it before i get back.
I go down at the other end of the bridge. There are many cars here. A collective runs the place. They want to provide accomodation for as many travellers as possible to stay overnight, to give them more time to deal with the queries.
Winter solstice was just two days ago. The temperature’s what we used to described as “worryingly mild”. Though I can’t imagine anybody who would still complain about that right now. Not those who are on the move, in any case.
24 December 2029, A7-A16 junction
Somewhere ahead is the border. Beyond that limit, France officially begins. Not sure anybone still really cares about that. Paris is still France, obviously, but the small towns on the way are just the small towns on the way. There are other limits which matter much more nowadays.
Reminiscences of how important going “abroad” was to my self-esteem as an artist. It was what made the work matter. The farther away it toured, the more relevant it seemed. To be “on the map” meant to regularly appear in that tight network of like-minded venues that were geographically scattered across the continent. I remember how we used to hop back and forth to other cities just for an evening, to see a show we had missed because we were travelling elsewhere to see yet another show. This was hardly travelling in fact, more like commuting. Business as usual. Paris was just a suburb of Brussels (or was it the other way round?). It all feels so improbable today.
25 December 2029, A2, between Flesquières et Havrincourt
As I sit in the grass on the middle strip for a rest, an ambulance screams past. Totally unbearable noise, i’m no longer used to that. Not having seen it come from the other direction, I assume it’s on its way to pick someone up. Something serious. You don’t burn biofuel if you don’t really need to. I wonder where the nearest hospital would be.
26 December 2029, Rocquigny rest aera
Woken up by knocks on the roof of the car this morning. It’s a chuncky Volvo I’d chosen last night, spacious and kind of nicely arranged. It dates from before all the electronic gimmicks so I can manually wind down the fogged up windows to see who’s there. A girl in her twenties. She asks if I feel like walking together for a bit. The guy at the reception had apparently pointed me out saying I was due to walk her route. So here she is. I still need to work through the queries box though. She waits for me. Two hours later we’re on our way.
She tells me she got on the motorway in Cambrai. She had just celebrated Christmas with her parents who live there (yesterday was Christmas… without the advertising and decorations I tend to forget about these things). She’s headed to a small town called Compiègne, two walking days down the A1, at exit 11. She’s involved in some project there. Her name is Bérénice.
27 December 2029, A1, near Chaulne
Nice travelling with someone else. A lot of time to exchange. Bérénice tells me more about her project. They’re trying to set up a kind of platform for the whole region – from Saint-Quentin to Beauvais, even to Saint-Denis. Quite ambitious. They want to have different forums, each dedicated to a defined field of activity, permaculture, energy production, healing methods, repurposing of disused devices, construction, repair methods, etc. She says the idea is to foster contact between neighbouring communities and to enable people to better share their knowledge and skills. We all face the same problems. We can all use different solutions.
29 December 2029, Auberge du clocher, Villeneuve-Sur-Verberie
Got back on the motorway via the muddy D935. I joined Bérénice for the meeting in Compiègne yesterday. Was quite interesting, worth the extra 20km in any case. None of them was over 25. It made me feel like a dinosaur. Main topic on the agenda was communication: how to make sure all travellers spread the info? In which query stations to hang posters? Is it enough to hang them in query stations? What about people who don’t use them? How many copies will they have time to make?
Intense conversations through the whole evening afterwards. They spoke a lot about needing to keep the “EU spirit” alive (had to ask to be sure if they really meant the European Union). If any of them had ever visited another European country it must have been as small kids. I wonder what the EU means to them. Not much to do with the institutions in any case. Rather an attitude. Something that keeps us aware of distant communities, something reminding us of difference; the different people and places, which are now too far to reach. I think about that map, the one with the scale measured in travel time rather than in distance. On it, the eurostar made central London closer to Paris than to its own suburbs (who made that map again? Should remember to leave a query about that). It would pretty much look like any other map if we drew it again today.
How incredibly welcoming they were in Compiègne. Like in most places actually. Foreign people passing through is in most cases the only way to get news from distant places. It’s well worth a bed or a meal. I think about how humbling the past 10 years have been for all of us. Is this perhaps why everything has unfolded so peacefully until now? Humility should be listed high up on the ingredients of this new EU spirit in any case.
30 December 2029, former toll station, Senlis
Finally another query I am able to help with. It was almost falling off the bundle.
Does the European Parliament still exist?
Not that I am an expert in European politics in any way, but still, there’s a minimum I can contribute:
Although none of the European institutions have been officially dissolved, the EU parliament has not had a session in Brussels since august 2020. The building of the EU parliament has remained disused ever since. After a 4 month hiatus, the European Commission attempted to resume work in November of the same year, employing the civil servants still present in the Belgian capital. In practice, the logistic and communicational difficulties encountered after the global energy collapse forced the Commission to cease all activity by spring 2021 at the latest. Both buildings are still maintained on a voluntary basis by a group of ex-employees who also occasionally organise guided tours. The only political body of the EU still rumoured to be in activity today (Dec. 2029) is the European Council, although no meeting of head of states is known to have taken place in Brussels since 2024.
31 December 2029, former toll station, Senlis
I forgot my one and only pen when I left this morning. Had to walk back the 15 km to retreive it. The pen was still there on the dashboard of the car I slept in last night. It looks like I’ll stay there tonight as well. I won’t make it to Paris before the new year as planned. Not that it’s so important; there are just nicer ways I could imagine celebrating our entry into the next decade. Strong doubts about how much sense this trip makes after all. It feels so random right now. Nobody expects me there. No invitation. Just a wild guess that some theater venue would be happy to host a show coming from far away, something exotic. It can’t be so often that someone just turns up like that.