Marseille was my first destination for the Gibson Travelling Fellowship, and this trip ran from 23 to 27 September 2025. I was motivated primarily by a wish to connect with the contemporary art venues in the city, particularly Friche la Belle de Mai, a venue that hosts a wide range of different exhibitions. It was the exhibition Tipping Point specifically that first drew me to visit, as it included work reflecting on heritage and identity through different technologies, closely aligned with concerns in my own practice. This was the first of two planned trips to Marseille. My second visit will take place in October 2026 to coincide with CHRONIQUES – la Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques, when I intend to see how the Biennale approaches similar concerns and which artists are involved. Marseille sits on the southern coast of France as a site of diasporic passage and a gateway between cultures, with a strong connection to North African and Arab culture, and I wanted to see how artists working in this city at a genuine crossroads of culture were presenting their work. Most of my time in the city outside scheduled visits was spent on foot, deliberately traversing the urban landscape to build a felt sense of its topography and geography. This first trip provided an opportunity for me to make some new connections, familiarise myself with different artists and their practices, and reflect on how I think about presenting my own work and how it connects into a broader field of contemporary practice being made right now.
MuCEM — Centre de Conservation et de Ressources
Museum collections archive
An unplanned first stop encountered on the walk toward Friche la Belle de Mai rather than a scheduled visit, arrived at somewhat by accident. This separate building connected to MuCEM houses the museum's conservation work and research resources, distinct from the main exhibition space. The exhibition here focused on archival objects and the staging or scenography of collections, an unexpectedly close encounter with concerns very near my own practice around how archival material is presented and framed within an exhibition space. Noted for future reference as a possible research contact point.
Tunnel des 1000 Signes
Tunnel Bénédit-Jobin, 2013, Frédéric Clavère
The Tunnel des 1000 Signes, officially the Tunnel Bénédit-Jobin, is a permanent public artwork inside the pedestrian and road tunnel leading directly to Friche la Belle de Mai, connecting the Longchamp and Belle de Mai neighbourhoods. Transformed in 2013 by artist Frédéric Clavère, the walls feature over 460 painted panels and mosaics of symbols, logos, and pictograms, designed to make a formerly gloomy railway underpass feel safe, welcoming, and culturally reflective of the local community's imagination. A genuinely interesting engagement with iconography, signage, and signifiers, and with the site specificity of the installation itself.
Friche la Belle de Mai
Artist-run cultural space
General grounds and exterior views of the venue, a major site for contemporary art in Marseille hosting multiple simultaneous exhibitions and spaces.
Viens avec moi
A small group show in the space beside the café, an unplanned but very welcome encounter to begin the visit, featuring delicate sculptural installations working across a range of different materialities.
Tipping Point
The main reason for visiting Friche, a group show bringing together ten artists from the French speaking Belgian art scene alongside two Marseille based artists, built around the idea of a tipping point as a moment suspended between two states carrying both rupture and anxiety about the future. A recurring concern across the show was how artists translate digital or virtual realities into tangible physical form, closely aligned with key concerns in my own practice. A central artist here was Jonathan Sullam, born Brussels 1979, who showed Slow Burn, 2021, digital print on vinyl with neon lights, metal frame, DMX and Arduino, an installation built from a journalist's photograph documenting the destruction of Raqqa in Syria, mounted across a large array of neon light tubes on a programmed lifespan tied to the tubes themselves, where the image only resolves through the viewer's own act of mental reconstruction between the gaps in the neon strips as brightness subtly fluctuates. The artist both gives the photograph material presence and simultaneously disrupts its readability, an expanded photographic practice that forces an active work of remembrance, echoing both the ruined landscape left by the explosion and the broader difficulty of grasping the complexity of geopolitical conflict. The same artist showed two further works from the Egypt Exile series, Mer Morte and Pop'N'Lidy II, 2022, digital prints on plasterboard with metal frame and neon, reflecting on the journey of his paternal family across Syria Iraq and Egypt, drawing on photographs dated 1957 before the family's exile from Egypt under Nasser's regime. Figures of relatives were digitally erased from the source images leaving empty landscapes printed onto plasterboard, a material associated with home construction whose absorbent surface leaves the images looking worn and fragile, the panels fragmented and sutured back together with neon light in a gesture of repair. In the artist's own words, it is about a rupture with a territory, with a culture. I belong to a culture through my origins, but I don't fully identify with it. I feel like a grafted element that isn't quite part of the whole. Also included in the show was a video game work by Anna Safiatou Touré, born Bamako Mali 1996, titled Dgéba, 2025, narrated in Dgéba, a fictional language invented by the artist inspired by Bambara and Soninke sounds spoken by her father in Mali, inviting players to explore the Gamanké Museum, 2025, a fictional museum set in an invented desert region called Kanéma, housing a collection of masks created by the artist using negative casts of tourist souvenirs, which come to life in the game and confront the player with the entities they represent, activating them and in doing so helping release them. Touré considers memory an active process and the work invites reflection on how we relate to the past particularly within museum spaces, alongside an evolving 58 page leporello edition dictionary of the Dgéba language, hand bound by Maxime Blanpain. A piece I had previously encountered in earlier form at the International Centre for the Image exhibition Foreword in Dublin in July 2025 in which I also took part. Also included in the show was Medusa by Emmanuel Van der Auwera, another key piece.
Entre deux eaux
A graduating show from the École des Beaux Arts de Marseille inspired by the local context of the city and by the uncanny in between feeling that comes with the transition out of art school. The show carried strong recurring themes of global instability, imperialist wars, neoliberal policy, and slow violence, alongside works examining the transmission of diasporic stories, familial and cultural memory, and intergenerational struggle, many of the same threads that run through my own work. Key pieces included Les Volcans Vivants by Emma Cambier and La Dent de Lumumba by Ngoy Clovis M, an installation built from an oil barrel.
Cité des Artistes
Artist studios and residency space
A converted convent housing artist residencies and studio spaces, a quiet haven of grounds and nature within the city.
Deletere Laboratories
Contact was made through Ilona at the Chroniques media lab, who suggested reaching out to Deletere, a nomadic art and research collective based within Le Couvent at Cité des Artistes near Friche la Belle de Mai working with VR. Correspondence with Adeline Schweitzer led to a meeting on site with colleague Gaëtan Parseihian, who gave a tour of the space and spoke at length about the collective's approach to technology and their process, working in a non-commercial, non-traditional way outside conventional production structures. A genuinely refreshing encounter and a valuable contact for future collaboration.
MAC — Musée d'Art Contemporain
Contemporary art museum
A major exhibition of work by Ali Cherri, spanning sculptural and video work built around the removal of objects from traditional Western museum narratives and their recontextualisation. The Digger, produced by Sharjah Art Foundation, was watched in full. Also encountered here was Saphir by Zineb Sedira, a work long known by reputation but never previously seen in person.
Ali Cherri
Musée Cantini
Municipal museum of modern art
An exhibition of work by Alberto Giacometti, the first opportunity to encounter his sculpture in person, his work never previously having been shown in Marseille. A chance to see numerous emblematic surrealist pieces alongside the later spindly figural works.
Museum of Marseille History
Visited to build a sense of the city's architectural and cultural history and its origins, and to consider what archival material held here might be relevant to my own ongoing research.
MuCEM
Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations
The final stop of the trip, a visit to the museum's permanent exhibition Méditerranées, covering the intertwined histories of the wider Mediterranean region and the twenty two countries that share it, along with all the exchange, conflict, and confrontation that has passed between them. Notable objects included cuneiform tablets, astrolabes, and manuscripts, showcasing the art, science, and innovation of Arab and Muslim scholars particularly from Morocco and Syria across several centuries rather than any single delineated period.