Exhibition; 'Marseille' at atelier de visu

Text by Christian Garcin on 'Marseille', October 2013

The Muffled Sound of Raised Voices;

Anyone who grew up in Marseilles knows how much life in this city takes

place for the most part far from the generally accepted, although actually

quite recent, images of sunny, Pagnol-like scenes, loquacity, afternoon naps

and laughter in cafes. Before being a destination for tourists keen to be lulled

by the sound of waves lapping on the shore as, a glass of rose in hand, they

boost their melanin levels (non-activities that are nevertheless respectable),

the Mediterranean area had always been a place of tragedy, cutting shadows,

secrets, and harsh fates: for confirmation, you only have to read the writings

of Greeks from either Greece or Turkey – the native lands of those sailors

who founded Massalia twenty-six centuries ago. Or else, you only have to live 

in Marseilles. Tacitus said of the Marseillais that they combined “the

politeness of the Greeks with the austerity of the inhabitants of Provence”.

A few centuries later, Joseph Conrad remembered having seen there “sturdy

girls with pure profiles, superb heads of elaborately styled black hair, black

eyes and dazzling white teeth”. (I came across them one evening in a tavern

in Kythira: two tall, rough yet beautiful waitresses with intense eyes, their

prune-black hair tied back in a knot, and their mother, who was sitting to one

side and wearing on her face, in her bearing and in her eyes, the thousandyear-

old tranquillity of theatrical queens as a mask of ancient fatality.)

Marseilles, like a good number of Mediterranean ports, lives in a permanent

and austere state of black and white. The mistral ravages everything, the sea

roars, the sun burns, the sounds, odours and colours lay siege to our senses,

and the shadows are violent, as are people’s lives. I grew up in Endoume, not

far from the Saint-Victor abbey, in a tarmacked cul-de-sac whose inhabitants

had Provencal, Italian or Spanish names. Winters were grey and summers

were blindingly white. I only discovered the colours of the Mediterranean

later, when I studied the history of art. Of the Plage du Prophete where I used

to bathe, I especially remember the white foam of the waves tossed about by

the mistral. The walls of the community school, the tarmac of the cul-de-sac,

our shutters and the neighbours’, the surrounding rocks, the kerbs, my

father’s car, his suit; all of that was grey, or strongly contrasting black and

white. Even the pictures on the television set. Even the photos taken during

that time. Later, I passed through every bit of Marseilles for various

professional activities. I believe I can say that there is not a single

neighbourhood that I did not visit. The dazzlements, the darkness,

the silence and the din of this city accompanied me everywhere I went, from

Callelongue to the Aygalades, from Endoume to Ch‰teau-Gombert, from Roy

d’Espagne to the Plan d’Aou. If there is any consistency in this city, it is

definitely in the extreme intensity of contours, perspectives, lights, odours,

gestures and voices. In Marseilles, all people – and all places – are on their

own front line, presenting themselves with a fiery spirit that’s tinged with

distrust. The pieces of Marseilles’ reality that Yusuf Sevincli picks up are

broken glass on a pavement. They do not form one thematic unit but a torn

fabric, revealing an eye that is both erratic and sharp. What they unveil of

Marseilles is something of all that, which both names the city and also files it

under the label of crude, immediate reality: the fiery spirit and the secrets, the

violent shadows and the dreary streets, the grey concrete blocks, the torn

beaches, the filth, the light, the eternal youth – and always, everywhere, this

hidden anxiety that rises to the surface and reminds us that in Marseilles,

antiquity, with its succession of insanities, curses, retaliations and broken

destinies, is never very far away. The Mediterranean is singular. The sailors who founded Massalia in the 6th century BC had set sail from the Aegean 

coast of Turkey. Yusuf Sevincli, for his part, was born on the northern coast

and lives in Istanbul on the Bosphorus Strait, between the Mediterranean and

the Black Sea, and at the crossroads of two worlds and several civilizations. A

man with such a mix of rich cultures was required to detect, beneath the

vaguely flashy contemporary varnish (although in Marseilles nothing remains

so for very long), the harshness of the ancient greyness, the diffuse

uneasiness of certain street corners, the cemented anarchy taking up space

in the middle of creeks, the beautiful violence in people’s eyes, the proud and

feigned carelessness of youth, and the tragic meaning of life that rushes by,

carried along as always by the mistral and the muffled sound of raised

voices.