‘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’ (2017: 386). Huts are central to Le Livre des cabanes [The Book of Huts] (2015), the seventh volume in a series that develops what Gleize calls ‘post-poetry’, or writing which operates as investigation rather than as expression. This essay analyses The Book of Huts in relation to Doreen Massey’s argument in For Space (2005) that space should be understood as the intersection of multiple trajectories; an essay by Marielle Macé, Nos cabanes [Our Huts] (2021), which reflects on collectivity from an ecological perspective; and Kristin Ross’s study of the importance of the Paris Commune for subsequent thought (2015). I argue that, for Gleize, huts are pockets of communal resistance, at once literal and metaphorical structures that act as barricades to the incursions of authority and provisional places of welcome that are dismantled and reconstructed elsewhere. His writing encourages non-hierarchical, hospitable dwellings and its form—montages of fragmented material, including photographs as well as text from a variety of sources—exemplifies a constantly renegotiated collective that engages with the world outside while resisting many of society’s structures.