A flannerie into industrialized destructive art.

 The weather was too beautiful to stay indoors in front of a computer screen.
Lightly overcast. Raining, but not in that sense that anyone from a rainy region would call it raining. And a wind that was neither cold, nor warm. Only something to direct the refreshing water onto one's face.
Since I had heard that everything was going to be closed due to the Monday after Easter being a bank holiday I decided to wander the streets of Rennes in what I assumed would be empty.
I wanted to find something new. I was looking for a section where the old and beautiful architecture had stretched out an arm like an amoeba and wasn't restricted to the small sections I had already wandered. In taking the train to Nantes I had remembered seeing sections of the city from the speeding train that looked interesting so I went to Gares to begin my wanderings. I headed West along the tracks.
Soon I came across one of those many areas that I have been finding while wandering about Rennes. The edge of the old being torn down and replaced with the new.
Ugly boxes reaching towards the sky to house copious amounts of people. Industrial structures that look like someone watched too many scifi films from the 1970s.
In the future we will all be placed in small white boxes. Everything will be made of plastic.
It seems that people have forgotten to think about how things age.
As I walk though an area where it feels as though even the road is a new thing and the bus stop states that the line is opening at the beginning of this year I see a building haphazardly surrounded by fencing.

 The interior is filled with graffiti. Something industrial from days past. Everything falling apart. Doors missing. Holes in the roof leaking the rain to the floor. Debris strewn across the floor. Light comes in through windows at an angle to the roof. Not perpendicular, not parallel.
The graffiti is in layers. Initially little hand signs have been covered up with better quality pieces, which then have little hand signs and comments placed upon them. The deterioration changes the canvas. As I am taking pictures a man comes in as well admiring the graffiti and tells me that there are more buildings behind the original I found filled with more graffiti. I think he says former train station, but that was probably just a mistranslation.

 The next building is completely trashed. Every step creates the echoing sound of thick glass being crunched beneath my feet. The industrial light bars all hang loose. Some more so than others, but still attached by a small chain to the framing.

 Some materials seem to be things that were left in the building before the artists entered. Items that were perhaps packaging. Things that were perhaps machinery. Everything was in chaos.
Take pictures, leave only footprints.

After wandering through the buildings I am only left with questions of what happened. There were more of these industrial buildings further back but they were left untouched as fencing separated them. My immediate thoughts are of progress closing industries and how the French love their protests.
This flannerie left me feeling as though I had entered another city. That I had somehow left the known of Rennes and entered some new French town. It wasn't the normal old center, or the young ghettos along the exterior. It was something new. The idea that I have just begun to understand this city that I have been in for the last 8 months.

I have missed the beauty that quiet rainy days can bring out.

As I leave the graffitied buildings I walk past a small camping site in the bushes. A crude symbol of a penis has been spray painted on a tree with an arrow pointing up into the branches.