Letters to a City: Four Love Notes to Marseille

Between Two Shores by Taous Dahmani

In Marseille there’s a ritual: after work, you head to the beach, crack open a beer and watch the sun sink into the Mediterranean. It’s easy to fall in love with the city during that golden hour, when the sky burns pink and orange and the waves shimmer and sparkle. The evening light glances off cargo ships – reminders of Marseille’s long history as a trading hub – and the ferry that links France to its North African neighbours: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia.

According to the 2019 census, immigrants from the Maghreb made up 46 percent of the foreign-born population in Marseille’s metropolitan area. Despite the city’s pull, my Algerian father chose Paris when he immigrated in the late 1970s. But, as an adult, I found my second home in Marseille and, though I now live in London, my heart still belongs to this hectic and complex city. Walking through places such as Noailles Market, which sells foods from the African continent, vendors remember me – not for my face but for my name, which is the same as their grandmothers and great-aunts. After a night out, taxi drivers refuse my fare, insisting they need to get me home safely.

The neighbourhoods around the Vieux-Port – Le Panier, Belsunce, Noailles – carry the weight of Marseille’s long entanglement with Algeria. The city’s port played a pivotal role in France’s invasion of Algeria in 1830, marking the start of 132 years of colonial occupation. Ships carried pieds-noirs (French settlers), soldiers and administrators southward, while Algerian goods flowed north. In the 19th century, Algerians worked in Marseille’s docks and soap factories, while the city also became a hub for unionizing and striking: it was here that the Arab Workers’ Movement was established in 1972. Echoes of that history reverberate around the city streets, through both World Wars, through migration and return, through exile and longing.

Today, tensions between the two countries flare up regularly – often sparked by inter-city football matches or, more seriously, incidents of police brutality – revealing the depth of a connection neither side can fully untangle. On a national level, the first and only time France faced Algeria on the pitch was in October 2001. With France leading 4–1, a wave of Algerian supporters surged onto the field, forcing the referee to halt the match. This event is addressed in Joyce Joumaa’s video work Bêtise Humaine (2024). Decades earlier, during the colonial era, Algerian players had competed in French leagues. But, as the war for independence escalated during the 1950s, many slipped away to form the National Liberation Front team in an act of resistance. This spirit of defiance was later echoed in the March for Equality and Against Racism, which began on 15 October 1983 in the Marseille neighbourhood of La Cayolle. Sparked by the police shooting of Toumi Djaïdja, it was France’s first major anti-racism march, led largely by the North African diaspora, demanding equal rights, an end to police violence and recognition of systemic racism. During the second half of the 1980s, my father was involved in organizing subsequent civil-rights marches.

Throughout the decades, North Africans have found a home in Marseille, living between two worlds – whether physically or mentally – yet making the city their own. As a friend of mine once laughed, ‘Marseille? It’s Algiers with national insurance as a bonus!’ But it’s not just people who migrate between the two countries; music and images do, too. This phenomenon of cultural flux is explored in the first part of Katia Kameli’s film trilogy Le Roman algérien (The Algerian Novel, 2019), which unfolds on rue Larbi Ben M’Hidi in Algiers, where Farouk Azzoug and his son run a nomadic kiosk selling old postcards and photographic archive reproductions. This eclectic collection echoes both colonial and post-colonial iconography and the exchanges between the two countries. I first saw this film in 2021 at the FRAC Sud art centre, just a 15-minute stroll along the waterfront from the port. A 30-minute walk in the other direction leads to the Algerian Consulate in Marseille, where I once tried to renew my Algerian passport. There, everyone carries a story of being stranded between two shores.

Resonant Chambers by Oriane Durand 

In the wake of a sudden breakup in the summer of 2021, I found myself back in Marseille, my hometown. Walking became my refuge, and so too, unexpectedly, did Notre-Dame de la Garde. A year earlier, after living in Germany for almost two decades, I had left my position as director of Dortmunder Kunstverein and returned to France to live with my partner. I moved into his small Parisian apartment just two weeks before the COVID-19 lockdown began. A year after that, he left me without warning.

Stunned and unmoored from any stable routine, I was convinced I could rebuild my life in Marseille. I settled into the empty house my mother had left behind when she moved to Hanoi for work, converting it into a project space named Le Berceau. I organized the first exhibition, ‘Cancer de la gorge’ (Throat Cancer, 2020), with the artists Fabienne Audéoud and Anne-Lise Coste. The following year, my friend Carla Donauer and I curated ‘Diananess’ (2021), featuring Christiane Blattmann and Jannis Marwitz. For the duration of the installation, the house became a lively residence. After the opening, however, I found myself alone, faced with my pain.

Walking became a means of respite. I arranged studio visits, traversing the city to meet artists dispersed across its quarters. Many, like me, were recent arrivals, drawn by the iodine-tinged air and still-affordable rents. The idea of a ‘new Berlin’ was gaining traction and I found it enticing. Compelling initiatives such as Belsunce Projects, Giselle’s Books, OCTO and SYSTEMA were springing up – some of which, fortunately, remain active today. This vibrant energy inspired me to embark upon a new chapter in Marseille.

One day, while out walking, I veered off course. My steps led me up the hill to the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde – known locally as la Bonne Mère (the Good Mother). Crowned by a gilded statue of the Virgin and Child, the neo-Byzantine church dominates the city’s skyline. Inside, colourful mosaics adorn the walls, alongside a profusion of ex-votos and ship models suspended from the ceiling – a testament to the Virgin’s role as the guardian of sailors. Locals of all faiths, along with visitors from afar, make their way up the hill, whether on foot, by bike, aboard the small tourist train or by car. It is a pilgrimage site for all – even the agnostic. Its 360-degree views are breathtaking, the city sprawling out below like a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking buildings, framed by a sweeping arc of mountains.

That day, the crowd was sparse. I entered the building and took a seat on a pew, catching my breath after the climb and trying to cool off from the heat. Closing my eyes, I found myself able to hear what I was feeling. The space around me became a resonant chamber. It was if my mind was re-entering my body, emerging from a state of dissociation that had carried me through the last few months. As I stepped out, I descended the slope leading to the sea, to swim at Plage du Prophète, a beach nestled into a sheltered cove. A realization took hold: Marseille was my city – it had welcomed, healed and restored me – but only so that I could set off once more, toward unknown adventures.

My memory flashed back to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s video installation Fireworks (Archives) (2014), which I had discovered several weeks earlier in the FRAC Paca collection. I realized that this work, which offers an exhilarating journey through the world of the dead, had provided me with a cathartic sensory experience much like the one I was currently undergoing. I plunged into the water and emerged renewed, buoyed by the energy of the city that I love so much. I was ready to step back into the world.

Notes from the Margins by Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva

By the time I finally moved to Marseille in late 2022, the city had been on my mind for years. Despite knowing no one who lived there, the appeal predated relocations to both Lisbon and Hong Kong. At first, I entertained fantasies of a cosmopolitan seaside port bathed in sunlight, sparked by a vague memory of the Plage du Prophète, an urban beach tucked beneath the Corniche Kennedy. Here, suspended in the deep waves and sensing their slow, powerful rhythm, my gaze would drift from the cliff and the house-dotted hill above me to the flat line of the Mediterranean horizon.

According to Marseille’s tourist office, the beach was named either after The Prophet – a steamship transporting goods between Marseille, Morocco and Algeria that anchored in the alcove in the 1850s – or the baritone Jean-Vital Jammes (aka Ismaël), who performed the titular role in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète (1849) and later acquired a villa above the beach, from where his voice would ring out as he rehearsed his arias. I’ve come to appreciate how multiple explanations suit Marseille, with such truths often coexisting naturally and a singular version defiantly refusing to stick.

The city’s summer afternoons are marked by the arc of boys who leap into the sea from the ramparts of Fort Saint-Jean, at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, round to the lower rocks of Plages du Prado. Unbothered by regulations, their plunges shimmer with sunlit torsos and sharp laughter.

Just above Malmousque, overlooking the island-fortress of Château d’If – once a prison, immortalized in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) – sits La Traverse, an art space and kitchen created by Catherine Bastide. After running her eponymous gallery in Brussels for two decades, she turned away from the white cube to host artists, chefs and designers in a domestic setting accompanied by sunset sea views.

Having curated Sandra Hauser’s solo show, ‘1 Split Second’, at La Traverse last spring, I can attest not only to the beauty and merit of the space, but also to the soft tensions that hover around it: neighbours with enviable houses but little curiosity for art complaining when a vernissage runs a little late; designers and guests from Berlin or Los Angeles settling in easily, while others, more rooted in the local art scene, hesitating at the door, unsure whether such refined surroundings are meant for them.

Away from the coast, between the port and the city’s Saint-Charles train station, lies Belsunce – a dense, working-class neighbourhood and one of Marseille’s historic cradles of immigration, where Armenian Christians settled after fleeing the Ottoman Empire genocide of 1915–16. This setting of collective histories hosts La Compagnie, a space that naturally emerges as a countercultural institution.

La Compagnie opens its doors to the underrepresented and the quietly brilliant – artists and thinkers, both local and international, who speak from the periphery and move through the world with openness and care. Earlier this year, I attended a talk there by the philosopher Dénètem Touam Bona titled ‘The Stealthy Uprising of the Black Zones of Offensive Uncertainty’. His reflections on marronage – the historical and ongoing acts of escape from systems of enslavement and oppression – and other fugitive forms of resistance mirror the space’s commitment to the plurality of ideas without the need for resolution and to the championing of alternatives to the extractive gaze. As Touam Bona suggests, resistance may require forms of disappearance or ambiguity, a kind of tactical opacity through which marginal voices can survive and generate meaning without being absorbed into dominant frameworks.

Marseille itself feels like a city of fugitive trajectories – a port of arrival and escape, where layered histories, migrations and reinventions convene. It can be a place where jobs are scarce and things seem to run late, but Marseille is also resourceful, forgiving and surprisingly good-natured.

Ascents and Descents by Wilson Tarbox

Arriving from Paris by train, I descend the monumental staircase at Marseille’s Saint-Charles station – a vast, theatrical sweep of stone that carries passengers not only into the heart of the city but across layers of buried history. The station itself was built atop the former Saint-Charles cemetery, a sprawling necropolis where the city’s dead were interred until the mid-19th century. Unfurling in broad, symmetrical flights, the staircase is flanked by ornate lampposts and an array of statuary designed to impress upon visitors the vision of Marseille as France’s imperial gateway to the Mediterranean and beyond. At its base, flanking the balustrades, stand allegorical female nudes – including Louis Botinelly’s Colonies d’Asie and Colonies d’Afrique (1923–24) – representing the nation’s imperial holdings, their classical poses cloaking the brutal realities of colonial domination. In 2020, Julien Creuzet performed Playlist for a Colonial Monument on this staircase, countering the 20th-century imperialist propaganda with thumping pop music in a gesture of refusal.

A 20-minute jaunt along rues Honnorat and Guibal, through graffiti-lined tunnels, leads to La Friche la Belle de Mai, a 45,000 square metre cultural complex in a former tobacco factory. The space is something like Marseille in miniature: chaotic, sprawling and vivacious. Its walls – thick with peeling posters and sun-bleached slogans – contain the sediment of decades of counter-cultural life. Today, La Friche bills itself as a fabrique de culture (culture factory), equal parts contemporary art centre, skate park and neighbourhood hangout. I meet the poet Estelle Coppolani for lunch there, at Les Grandes Tables. The food is decent; the service, abysmal. ‘That’s Marseille, baby,’ Estelle laughs, quoting the rapper Jul. After lunch, Estelle and I meet Elise Poitevin – co-founder of the Sissi Club gallery – at a café in Le Panier. The oldest neighbourhood in Marseille, Le Panier sits on the site of the Ancient Greek colony of Massalia, founded in c.600 BCE. Its architecture – narrow, winding alleys, irregularly built houses and steep staircases – preserves something of the city’s original character, despite the sweeping urban planning projects that have reshaped much of it since the 19th century.

Over coffee, Elise speaks capaciously about the history of Marseille’s art scene, the subject of her master’s thesis at Aix-Marseille University, where she met Anne Vimeux, co-founder of Sissi Club. Their affinities were not only aesthetic but political. ‘Marseille is a progressive dot in a very conservative, even reactionary region,’ Elise explains, painting an image of the city’s cultural scene – gritty, DIY, anarchistic – as antithetical to that of Paris.

A ten-minute metro ride takes us from Marseille city centre to the green suburb of Sainte-Anne. From the station, a 20-minute walk along boulevard Michelet brings us to La Cité Radieuse. The most famous of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation (housing unit) complexes, this iconic modernist building’s immense concrete facade is enlivened by splashes of colour. When proposed in 1947, the housing project provoked a fierce backlash, with local residents describing it in regional dialect as fada (crazy). Completed in 1952, it was Le Corbusier’s radical experiment in vertical living: not just apartments, but an entire city block in the sky, complete with shops, a post office, hotel and nursery. Today, visitors can wander through parts of this modernist relic and enjoy the summer exhibition programme at Marseille Modulor, a contemporary art centre founded by designer Ora-Ïto. Perched on the building’s roof – a concrete playground of curved forms and sculptural ventilation towers, affording panoramic views across the city to the Mediterranean beyond – the rooftop gives visitors the chance to experience one of the 20th century’s great architectural visions.

Marseille is a city of ascents and descents, not only through its tumultuous history and shifting cultural fortunes but, quite literally, through the steep staircases that lace its hillsides and neighbourhoods, mirroring a spirit that is uneven, unpolished and effervescent. Yet, moments of pause also reveal a softer side to the city: languid afternoons spent on the beach in Mont Rose, where the sea breeze carries conversations that flit between French, English and Arabic; nights that unspool in the crowded bars of Cours Julien, buzzing with colour and ebullience. 

This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘C’est Marseille, bébé’

^{Main image: View of the Port of Malmousque through a fence (detail). Image commissioned for frieze. Photograph: Francois Ollivier}