ENSEMBLE.s

ZAT Montpelier, France 2025

A Living Mosaic of Vibrant Communities, by UV LAB

In partnership with Créature.s Créatrice.s, Esprit Libre and Laboratoire Urbain.

Financed by the City of Montpellier.

Computational design, fabrication strategy, and detailed design: Michael R. DiCarlo

Structural engineering: Quentin Alart

Parametric distribution strategy for Zellige: Jawhar Kodadi

Assembly: UV LAB

Prefabrication: AMA (Amazing Modular Architecture)

Article by: Maher Samaan

At the top of a hill overlooking a landscape of intertwined homes and trees, a sculptural installation rises bringing together traditional craft, contemporary design, and the will of a diverse local community to reclaim their inhabited space and reimagine a shared future.

A crown, a channel, and a gathering point, the structure connects the shores of the Mediterranean, visible from afar, a landmark reflecting a hybrid vision of tomorrow: one that celebrates diversity, and speaks of a community reclaiming its space and shaping it through a renewed, collective identity.

At a crossroads in the northern outskirts of Montpellier, in the heart of La Mosson, the installation ENSEMBLE.s stands among dense Mediterranean trees. At dawn, light filters through its structure, meeting the footsteps, paths, histories, and horizons of the children, the workers and residents. Under ENSEMBLE.s the passage becomes a space where stories, materials, and lives intersect.

The installation itself is a metal framework — shaped as a hyperboloid, a fluid and tensile geometry that rises and opens like a breath — covered in vibrant zellige tiles. These colored fragments reflect light, sky, and greenery, echoing the surrounding environment while expressing the diversity of the community that created it, and will continue to live around it.

At the core of the project is a participatory process. UV LAB designed the installation's structure, while an interactive digital tool developed by Jawhar Kodadi opened the creative process to the public. Accessible via any browser, and combining traditional geometry with computational logic, the platform allowed more than 200 residents of diverse cultural and migratory backgrounds to design their own zellige patterns and produce them by hand. Over the course of four weeks, an open atelier settled into the heart of the neighborhood — a temporary laboratory where material, memory, and imagination converged. More than 8,000 ceramic pieces emerged from this collective process, each singular, each shaped by a different hand. These pieces now form the surface of the installation, giving it its color, texture, and meaning.

The workshops were led by Maryam Samaan, multidisciplinary artist; Nathalie Marinier-Julien, artisan ceramicist; Khaled Alwarea and Shnsho, co-founders of UV LAB; Nezha Hamdi Alaoui of Esprit Libre; and Jaafar Fanchi of Laboratoire Urbain. These were not simply educational moments — they were spaces of transmission, of conviviality, of slow resistance, transforming a community of spectators into a community of authors.

Crédit photo : Aras OMAR

Zellige, deeply rooted in North African artistic heritage, transformed by the hands of the people from a fixed tradition, to a living bridge. For some, it was a familiar language; for others, an invitation to learn and reinterpret. Rather than preserving or reproducing tradition, the project activated it, transforming it through collective gestures. Each ceramic piece carries the trace of a hand, a choice, a moment. Together, they form a composition that exceeds any individual contribution.

The final structure emerges from the landscape while blending into it. Its surfaces capture light like leaves and stones, echoing the rhythms of the natural environment. It does not impose itself, it enters into dialogue with its surroundings.

From a distance, the installation evokes something ancient. Its verticality and layered form recall ceremonial structures once imagined as connections between earth and sky. For ENSEMBLE.s, aims to reflect a gesture of gathering, reconnecting people to their lived space and experience, to one another.

Try the interactive digital tool developed by Jawhar Kodadi

Ensemble V12

Surrounded by modular wooden parametrically designed benches, the installation invites a child to climb, while someone rests, and another observes the Mediterranean's or an afar homeland. The artwork is not only to be seen, but to be lived, inhabited, and completed through presence.

The installation made of fragments, each shaped and colored by a different hand, contributes to a larger vision, a mosaic not only of forms, but of presences, journeys, and origins that remain visible within the whole. Rather than erasing differences, ENSEMBLE.s brings them together.

While the structure stands for years to come, ENSEMBLE.s remains open; a proposition that is neither fixed nor closed, but evolves through use and time, where culture reasserts itself as fluid, identity manifests as plural, and living together continues as an ongoing act of composition.

Each piece matters. Each presence counts. Together, they form a shared landscape.