28 Apr 20090
This blog provides a selection of articles posted under the various thematic blogs at BLOG2.013. Blog2.013 is an open and critical media space where you can find all sorts of audio productions, texts and images produced by Radio Grenouille, the radio station devoted to culture, as well as by various organisations and artists in Marseille and the surrounding region of Provence. Interviews, lectures, utopian projects, recordings of oral traditions, stories and music, walks, creative work and analysis, BLOG 2.013 documents Marseille and the Mediterranean and gives it a voice, together with the city’s artists, residents, challenges and paradoxes.
29 Jul 20080
Gilles Clément illustrated by Marseille: the Third Landscape of the L2
(Sur le parcours de la L2, jardins ouvriers © G. Mathieu)
Although Gilles Clément has never lived in Marseille, the landscape of Marseille seems to have been created specially to illustrate the ideas developed by this landscape designer over the last ten years or so. Nowhere else are the urban wastelands described in the concept of the “Third Landscape” as perfectly manifested as here in this urban area marked by edges, breaches and discontinuity. But still, what if the city ‘s neglect was in fact part of its charm?
This link between Marseille and the ideas developed by Gilles Clément has already made, in the study begun in Year 2000 by one of his former students, the landscape designer, Rémi Duthoit, who, among other projects, designed the little “bush” garden in La Joliette.
Clément’s ideas also find a direct echo in the experimental photography of Geoffroy Mathieu, who, for several years now, has focused on the urban environment and, in particular, on “pockets of resistance at the heart of urban violence, where the most isolated and vulnerable of people stubbornly pursue their attempts to create havens of poetry” (Dos à la mer series of photographs).
As part of a project devoted to the relationship between the city and nature in Marseille (to be published in 2009), Geoffroy Mathieu and Baptiste Lanaspeze also wandered around the plots of land pre-empted by the City Council back in the 1950s, land intended for “L2” bypass which was never built. From Saint Pierre cemetery (in the southeast of the city) to Frais-Vallon (east city centre), the two took their morning walk amid the wild grasses, medicinal herbs and allotments. Or, how the L2 illustrates the concept of the Third Landscape, “this undecided fragment of the planetary garden.”
Interview with Gilles Clément conducted by Xavier Thomas [41mn08]: Read and watch: Extracts from the interview selected by Baptiste Lanaspèze and photographs by Geoffroy Mathieu.
“What I call the Planetary Garden is the world seen as an enclosed space in which we look after and safeguard whatever we feel to be valuable.”
(Sur le parcours de la L2, Frais Vallon © G. Mathieu)
