Let's start with a demonstrable (but not irremediable) fact: the human being is certainly stupid.
He spends huge sums of money to travel into space in search of intelligent life, to reach planets that save him from safe and near extinction.
And yet, it is hard for him to imagine that the most livable paradise in the solar system, which we call Earth, could remain so if he changed just a few common sense things.
"Common" - and not "meaning" - is a term that scares most politicians.
They prefer their own, the "nation", which is none other than capital.
In Marseille, the nation of Zinedine Zidane (“first I am Marseille, then French and Algerian”) and also Walter Benjamin, who spent the last weeks of his existence there —to name just two personalities who have influenced mass culture—, The Commonauts Laboratory is in the making, the future ecological city of 26 centuries of history, the oldest in France and the most fragmented (divided into 111 administrative entities), with a third of the Algerian population and today burdened by the restrictions of confinement .
It has almost as many rats per inhabitant as New York or Paris, they are seen so rapturous, in the streets lined by beautiful and bare buildings with the shutters closed tight.
They are owned by mutual funds (other rats) in a city with very serious housing problems.
However, Marseille exhibits enormous energy, and proof of this is the change of its Government.
Michèle Rubirola is the new green mayor and to this is now added, in astral alignment, the itinerant biennial Manifesta, today one of the few artistic events that seem to have a future after the cultural debacle caused by the pandemic.
Ali Cherri's installation at the Museum of Fine Arts in Marseille.
Jean-Christophe Lett / Manifesta
Inaugurated yesterday against all odds, its 13th edition includes three programs:
Traits d'union.s (
six venues, 48 artists and collectives),
Le Tiers Program
(archives) and
Les Parallèles du Sud
(86 projects throughout the region), and It is hosted by curators Katerina Chuchalina, Stefan Kalmár and Alya Sebti.
In addition to the exhibitions and interventions in its different venues, it adds the urban project
Le Grand Puzzle,
directed by the Dutch MVRDV and The Why Factory, a study of the level of “sustainability” that the city could achieve in a few years if the “seeds of time ”(Fredric Jameson), that is, the ability of its inhabitants to imagine or fantasize about a possible perfect future.
The artistic event is comprehensive and sews music and dance spaces, non-profit galleries, museums and collections in the neighborhoods of Belsunce, Bourse / Noailles (Museum of the History of Marseille), Opéra (Conservatory, Cantini Museum), the Port, Le Panier (Casa de la Caridad) and Parc Longchamp, a lung built in the 19th century to supply water to the city after the plagues, with its fountains that connect two museums, Fine Arts and Natural History, and a zoo without real beasts.
In their place are life-size animal figures, each emitting the sounds of its own species.
Like being inside a fold-out children's book.
For decades, Marseille has had a dense network of associations and circular culture, with hundreds of communities and artistic collectives organized around social problems (housing, prostitution, poverty, LGTBI rights), a quality that it shares with other cities of a relatively large scale. similar, like Barcelona and Bilbao.
Many are featured in Manifesta, especially in the
amazing Tiers QG's
Invisible Files
show
.
Others come from outside, such as the small activist bible
Group-Think,
signed by the Danish Stine Marie Jacobsen, which proposes training strategies on “collective intelligence” that would be practiced in physical education classes for protests and mass mobilizations in the streets. , such as getting in a circle and throwing an inflatable ball, in the style of the Mayan ball game but without using the legs;
draw the silhouette of a person on a sheet and then fill it in with objects and material used in the demonstrations;
whistle, practice breathing or hand language methods.
The video 'Toli Toli' (2018), by the artist Minia Biabiany.
Jean-Christophe Lett / Manifesta
In the more conventional artistic interventions — no less effective in their activism — the level is very remarkable.
Many works have been produced by the biennial from on-
site
research
, such
as the invaluable one by Algerian architect Samia Henni, currently a professor at Cornell University, and her study on le droit au logement carried out from the collapse of two buildings. on Rue d'Aubagne, where eight people died and hundreds were left homeless;
or the glass plates where he draws the floors of
Le Corbusier's
Unité d'habitation
(1952) together with those of the houses of the workers who built it.
Also the totems of the Lebanese Ali Cherri, exquisite corpses in three dimensions;
and the sculptures and video of the Guadeloupean artist Minia Biabiany on the manufacture of silk and the language of the hands as an act of sound and subtle sexual encounter.
The old House of Charity houses the most moving ensemble, where the three-dimensional drawings of the Armenian Anna Boghiguian illuminate us devilishly, rereading Virginia Woolf
(To the lighthouse
)
and Clarice Lispector.
In the end, every work of art is always a process towards the light: there are no unknown masterpieces.
Unlike Balzac, in Woolf's novel the picture that Lily Briscoe paints acquires shape and body over time, since the work of art belongs to its time, to its space.
In Marseille, the art on display will not be for export (merchants stay away!), But rather it is circular: it begins and ends where it is, and all by mutual agreement.
Manifest 13.
Marseille.
Until November 29.
