“Place is now the new wilderness”

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For “Marseille as heard by…”, various artists from the city were invited to play a listening game. The results create an image of a city that is full of contrasts, a city that grates, seduces and infuriates.

This long-running series kicks off with the audio collage put together by ErikM, performer and sound artist linving in Marseille, who lent an amused ear to a city that loves to shout about itself…

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Impact 08 is a research programme set up as part of Liverpool 2008, European Capital of Culture. The idea is to assess the long-term effects of such an event…
Beatriz Garcia, the programme manager, recently came to Marseille. Invited by Marseille Provence 2013, she met a variety of operators (Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Marseille, ARCADE, town planning offices for the urban areas of Marseille and Toulon, etc.) with a view to keeping dialogue open into the crucial issues surrounding the assessment of cultural events.

Listen: an interview with Beatriz Garcia, conducted by Fred Kahn and Célia Pascaud, presenting the Impact 08 programme

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Interview with Franco Bianchini

Franco Bianchini is Professor and Director of Research at Leicester and Leeds Universities. He specialises in cultural and urban policy. He is also deeply involved in the “Cities on the edge” programme, the cities network initiated by Liverpool, European Capital of Culture in 2008, together with Marseille, Bremen, Gdansk, Istanbul and Naples. Franco Bianchini is convinced that it is usually at the edges of a city that innovation and a feeling of centrality are generated.

“Cities on the Edge is the most Europe-oriented programme in Liverpool for 2008,” Franco Bianchini told us. “It was set up in 2004 and includes six port cities that all have a very strong sense of identity and experience very similar problems, especially in terms of image. They all have economic problems and have highly ambiguous, not to say conflict-ridden relationships with the capital of the country in which they are located.”

In Franco Bianchini’s eyes, being on the edge is often synonymous with trend-setting and innovation. “We have explored the concept of “cities on the edge” in political, geographical, social and artistic terms. We began with the idea of an opera. Then we held a series of lectures on crime, interculturality, setting up programmes on “rebel reading”, urban music and the theatre of immigration, among other subjects. We have also developed a project called “Street philosophy” involving people that live and work on the streets: prostitutes, taxi drivers, street hawkers, etc. The Marseille film director, Thierry Aguila, is currently shooting a film on football supporters and their passionate, practically religious relationship with the game. Other projects will be launched in 2009, to be led by Marseille. After that, it will be Istanbul’s turn in 2010, followed by Bremen and Gdansk in 2011 and Naples in 2012.”

Listen: A brief overview of the Cities on the Edge programme and some of the past and future events and projects, taken from an interview with Franco Bianchini

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Assimix is another cheeky and quirky look at linguistics from Arteradio, the invention of an exclusive audio method for understanding and learning to speak every European language. A simple and fun language lesson for all our English, German, Alsatian, Portuguese, Arab, Finnish, French and Belgian neighbours…

An audio programme on arteradio.com

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(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.”

 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)

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This is the story of two cities, Arles and Alexandria, which share the history of the Mediterranean and a penchant for archaeology.

It is the story of the children on both sides of the same sea, who worked together to produce a Web Cartoon tracing the imaginary journey of a ship across the sea once known as Mare Nostrum.

For a year, the children, aged between 11 and 14, took part in workshops held in Arles and Alexandria, contributing to every stage of production for the web cartoon.

This project, sponsored by Zinc/ECM, an association that supports and challenges the cultural and artistic issues inherent in information technologies, also involved the Musée d’Arles et de la Provence Antiques (the Museum of Ancient Arles and Provence), the Centre d’Etudes Alexandrines (Alexandria Study Centre) and the Animanet network.

You can see the outcome of this fantastic adventure, in French or Arabic.  http://www.lafriche.org/marenostrum/

Links :
www.zinclafriche.org
www.arles-antique.cg13.fr
www.cealex.org

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Wastelands, abandoned industrial sites and warehouses, areas that aren’t marked on any map of the city, relics of an industrial past that has vanished or been relocated: these are “no-go areas” that have so far escaped the property speculators and been taken over by artists.
Writers, artists and sculptors, designers working in every imaginable genre and architects are transforming these city interstices into spaces where everything and anything becomes possible, where they can experiment with new forms of artistic and social practice.

To describe the evolution of these Utopian spaces, here we present an interview with the architect, Patrick Bouchain, Grounds for initiative.

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In December 2007, the French network of the Anna Lindh Foundation held a meeting in Marseille. The capital of the region was the ideal place for such a meeting, which brought together operators involved in cultural exchanges within the EuroMediterranean zone. In fact, half of the 120 French associations that are members of the Anna Lindh Foundation are based in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (Paca) region and, more specifically, in Marseille.
Far from being an occasion for resting on their laurels and patting themselves on the back, the debates and discussions held provided an opportunity for those attending to question the limits of artistic cooperation between the two shores of the Mediterranean and the conditions necessary to optimize it.

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You’ve never heard of the granny from the Panier? The Panier is a working-class district, situated next to the Old Port in Marseille.
Watch and listen… a video produced by the Tabasco association, which works with the residents of the Panier, in the centre of Marseille, to broadcast a neighbourhood WebTV.

http://www.tabascovideo.com/

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