Marseille

The architectural heritage of Marseille reflects all the epochs that marked the history of this great city of the Mediterranean world.

Religious buildings are not lacking in Marseille, starting with the very famous Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde. Perched on the heights of the city, the latter offers a 360 ° panorama to its visitors, allowing to admire all the most beautiful landscapes around. Founded in 1214, it was quickly an important pilgrimage site for sailors. Inside, one can admire a real masterpiece of polychromy inspired by Byzantine culture, as well as a beautiful silver statue on the high altar. The Good Mother, perched atop the bell tower, has protected the whole city since 1869.

Major, the cathedral of the city, replaced the Old Major, a church dating from the twelfth century. The present building was built in the second half of the 19th century and reveals a beautiful alternation of green and white stones on its façade. In the Byzantine style, the interior harmoniously blends the colors of the stones of Florence, Carrara marble or Tunisian onyx, all adorned with monumental mosaics. In the town, you will also discover the Saint-Laurent church of Provençal Romanesque style, or the Saint-Victor abbey and its parts dating from the 11th century.

Several forts, which formerly served to protect Marseille, are still visible, like that of Saint-Jean. It opens today to the public with the organization of exhibitions proposed by the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean. Classified as Historic Monuments, Fort Saint-Nicolas, still occupied by the army, was built, like the previous one, under the orders of Louis XIV.

As you walk through the city, you will also have the opportunity to admire beautiful 19th century mansions, such as the Palace of the Pharo built for the Empress Eugenie or the buildings of the Rue de la République which connects the Old Port In the Joliette district.

Built in 1862, the Longchamp Palace, classified and listed in the Historic Monuments, deserves a detour. It includes a water tower, as well as two important museums. The Museum of Fine Arts unveils collections of paintings, sculptures and other drawings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, while the Museum of Natural History, classified as a museum in France, offers more than 80,000 specimens of animals or 200,000 specimens plants. The latter are presented in four themed rooms, including the one in Provence, listed in the Historical Monuments for its frescoes painted by Raphaël Ponson.

Museums are not lacking in Marseille, which includes no fewer than 26 cultural sites. Opened in 2013, the MuCEM, Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean, is one of the most important. Located on the sea, it offers the old collections of the museum of arts and folk traditions of Paris, now closed. You can also discover the history museum of Marseille, which reveals the city's past, the museum of contemporary art, or the Cantini Museum, which also offers collections of modern and contemporary art.

Rich in interest, the natural heritage of Marseille also deserves attention, especially the famous calanques, the first peri-urban national park in Europe. In the Phocaean city, several parks open their doors, like the park Borély, or that of the beaches of Prado which overlook the Mediterranean Sea.

Marseille has several markets located all over the city. You can discover a flower market from Monday to Saturday, in the morning, a farmers' market from September to June on Mondays, or weekly markets taking place every day of the week. Marseille also offers a Christmas market in December.

World Music Forum, Babel Med Music is organized in March.

In April or May, the Reflets festival highlights the lesbian, gay, bi and trans cinema with its varied and varied cultural activities.

The international dance festival of Marseille is held between June and July.

Every year, in early July, Marseille hosts its international film festival with screenings and other conferences.

In July, Marseille Jazz of the five continents inflames the park of the palace of Longchamp.

In September, Marsatac offers electronic music concerts.

Organized by the pupils of the Central School of Marseille, the Massiliades festival offers concerts of contemporary music.

September in Sea proposes to appreciate large maritime parades.

Festival of world music, the Fiesta of the South takes place in October.

• From 25 march to 11 june 2023
• 20 Boulevard De Dunkerque, Frac Sud Cité de l'art contemporain
• Curator of the exhibition Muriel Enjalran. - With works by Richard Baquié, Io Burgard, Richard Deacon, Regina Demina, Monique Deregibus, Clarisse Hahn, Jeppe Hein, Jean-Baptiste Janisset, Théo Jossien, Peter Klasen, Ugo Rondinone, Mika Rottenberg, Ugo Schiavi, Michel Verjux… - The Frac will honor the tenth anniversary of its building with a set of works from its collection paying tribute to the architecture of Kengo Kuma. - Curator of the exhibition Muriel Enjalran. - With works by Richard Baquié, Io Burgard, Richard Deacon, Regina Demina, Monique Deregibus, Clarisse Hahn, Jeppe Hein, Jean-Baptiste Janisset, Théo Jossien, Peter Klasen, Ugo Rondinone, Mika Rottenberg, Ugo Schiavi, Michel Verjux… - The Frac will honor the tenth anniversary of its building with a set of works from its collection paying tribute to the architecture of Kengo Kuma. - This exhibition is based on the science fiction novel Solaris written in 1961 by Stanislas Lem, and the film of the same name by Andrei Tarkovski, a metaphysical and memorial fable describing the expedition of scientists to a distant planet, intrigued by the strange phenomena that seem to be generated by a vast protoplasmic and protean ocean. This mysterious mass behaves like a giant brain capable of printing and reproducing physical entities from their past. The architecture of the building designed by Kengo Kuma, with its glass panels on the façade, its panoramic openings, its walkways and its gangways, acts as a vessel in which the plot of Solaris is replayed with works that echo the universe described by the novel and the film. They act as links in a chain of stories forming possible narratives activated by the path of the "Solarist" visitor. Solaris thus projects the Frac towards a future imagined by these researchers and inventors of new forms that are the artists, in this dedicated exhibition space, place of memory and multiple metamorphoses. - From Io Burgard to Richard Baquié, from Ugo Schiavi to Jeppe Hein, from Peter Klasen to Clarisse Hahn, to Regina Demina, this exhibition is based on a selection of works from recent acquisitions of the last three years, compared with historical works from the collection. - The exhibition is based on the science fiction novel Solaris, written in 1961 by Stanislas Lem, and the film of the same name by Andrei Tarkovsky, a metaphysical and memorial fable describing an expedition to a distant planet by scientists intrigued by the strange phenomena that seem to be caused by a vast protoplasmic and protean ocean. This mysterious mass behaves like a giant brain capable of printing and reproducing physical entities from their past. The architecture of the building designed by Kengo Kuma, with its glass panels on the façade, its panoramic openings, its walkways and its gangways, acts as a vessel in which the plot of Solaris is replayed with works that echo the universe described by the novel and the film. They act as links in a chain of stories forming possible narratives activated by the path of the "Solarist" visitor. Solaris thus projects the Frac towards a future imagined by these researchers and inventors of new forms that are the artists, in this dedicated exhibition space, place of memory and multiple metamorphoses. - From Io Burgard to Richard Baquié, from Ugo Schiavi to Jeppe Hein, from Peter Klasen to Clarisse Hahn, to Regina Demina, this exhibition is based on a selection of works from recent acquisitions of the last three years, compared with historical works from the collection.

• From 25 march to 11 june 2023
• 20 Boulevard De Dunkerque, Frac Sud Cité de l'art contemporain
• The Frac invites Liv Jourdan and Mathis Pettenati, recent graduates of the Villa Arson, to invest its experimental stage. Each of the two artists, in the singularity of his plastic writing, contributes to an installation realized with four hands for this space. It is a question of the relationship to the living and its manifestations, through an installation which will solicit different forms of sensitive perception, whether visual, olfactory or sound. - Liv Jourdan, born in 1988, lives and works in Nice. She graduated from the Villa Arson in 2021. She has also followed a course in clinical psychology and practices theater. Her multidisciplinary research leads her to approach painting in its widened field, through a sensory fluidity and an aesthetic of the edges at the borders of sound arts, olfaction and poetry. Engaged in the new narratives of the anthropocene, she explores the relationships between ornamental impulses and the psychology of the link, between affects and living worlds. "I am inspired by research on symbiosis, mutualism and parasitism to give form to ornamental environments that touch the different senses. The ornamental dynamics, hybrids between figure and abstraction, evoke me phenomena of energies, exchanges, links which are in the heart of the living, of the relations between human. E.s and non human. E.s. It is these layers of interconnection that interest me" Liv Jourdan. - Born in 1997 in Toulouse, Mathis Pettenati lives and works in Brussels. Coming from a practice of drawing and printing, he began to paint at the end of his studies at the Villa Arson, from which he graduated in 2021. He is the winner of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation 2021. His painting, which could be described today as "painterly painting" is deployed on large formats and in series. Inhabited by plant motifs that are difficult to identify, Mathis Pettenati's paintings are constructed spontaneously in the studio following the rules laid down by the artist. - "There are many organic forms in my work and I like to think that the cycle of painting and the cycle of life are paralleled. It starts with an idea that germinates, which gradually spreads on the canvas, blooms and then becomes infested with fungi. It's time to move on to another format. There is also something alienating about painting the same images over and over. I almost forget the subject of the painting by repeating it - Extract from an interview between the artist and Vittorio Parisi, curator of the exhibition Timeline of a Fruit Puddle (Villa Arson 2022).

• From 15 april to 24 june 2023
• 2 Rue De la Charité, Centre International de la Poésie, Centre de la Vieille Charité
• Suzanne Doppelt writes and photographs. In all of her books, from Totem (2002) to And Suddenly Nothing (2022), there is a lot of talk about perception. What do we see ? To this banal question, the spiritist images showing the return of the dead, The Meadow is Poisonous (2007), the anamorphoses, these double paintings with a depraved perspective, Lazy Suzie (2009), or the secret painting of Jacopo di Barbari and his golden number, The Greatest Aberration (2012), each time bring a different answer. Or this optical box, this peepshow by Samuel van Hoogstraten, Vak spectra (2017) showing a Dutch interior whose vision is multiplied. In Amusement de mécanique (2014) it is an obsessive investigation that tries to decipher a still life stuck in the landscape. Rien à cette magie (2018), like a ritornello, revolves around the soap bubble of Chardin's painting, a spectral figure blown by a young man, in which an infinity of images are reflected. Meta donna (2020) looks at the bite of the Apulian tarantula and the ritual of dispossession in the 1960s through dance and music, and the latest book is about Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow up, another unfinished investigation in which the images are made between a park and a chemical bath before disappearing. - The exhibition that an image becomes in an electric field is a recovery and a redeployment of Suzanne Doppelt's photographs out of the book, out of the books, set by set, as well as a documented rearrangement, completed on the scale of a place, of a room, of a room to be visited. A device to rediscover and deepen this singular factory of images linked to poetic writing. - Suzanne Doppelt co-directed the magazine Détail with Pierre Alferi and was a member of the editorial committee of the magazine Vacarme. She has also worked on projects with Anne Portugal, François Matton, Jean-Christophe Bailly and Cole Swensen. She has exhibited her photographs at the Centre Pompidou, the French Institute in Naples, the ENS Lyon, the Martine Aboucaya Gallery, the Louvre Museum, NYU, Brown University, and the Ateliers des Arques. His books are published mainly by P.O.L. - Opening on Saturday, April 15 at 4pm, followed at 4:30pm by readings by Suzanne Doppelt, François Matton and Fabienne Raphoz.

• From 25 april to 29 july 2023
• 20 Rue Mirès, Bibliothèque Départementale des Bouches-du-Rhône
• Who has never smiled when discovering the mechanical walk of our artificial cousins, the robots ? Who has never imagined that they might be asking themselves questions that are strangely similar to ours ? - If machines are nowadays omnipresent in our daily life, robots are still discreet. However, they are an integral part of our imagination : they populate science fiction stories, invade children's bedrooms and are at the heart of countless stories. - The dream of the robot has gradually replaced that of the machine over the last two centuries. If the machine and the humanoid robot are metaphors of their time, what do they tell us ? - What if these figures are there to challenge us ? To the point of asking ourselves if we too have not become robots that blindly carry out a program. - The ABD exhibition takes us on a journey from the birth of the machine to the robot, in a field where science and imagination are intimately intertwined with archival documents, photographs of artists, toys, cinema, music, literature, contemporary art ? - Exhibition curators : Marc Atallah, director of the Maison de l ? ailleurs, Jean-Claude Heudin, researcher in Artificial Intelligence. - Collections : Bouches-du-Rhône departmental archives, Maison d ? Ailleurs, museum of science fiction, utopia and travel, association La Navale Marseille. - Artists : France Cadet, Zaven Paré. - Photographers : Max Aguillera-Hellweg, Vincent Fournier, Yves Gellie, Jacques Windenberger, Franck Pourcel.