On a quiet and leafy street not too far away from Marseille’s port and just round the corner from the city’s archive, a small swell of images unfolds along a 74 meter long wall. Here for the summer, Seasides (Bords de mer) features five photographers living and working in the Bouches-du-Rhône area who were commissioned to make new projects around the common “maritime space” that shapes everyday life in this part of the world.
Much like a stroll along the coast, Seasides offers passersby a lively assortment of perspectives. Snippets of different people doing different things, some by themselves, others gathered together in a pack, some taking in the sea’s quietness, others bustling with activity. The fleeting everyday moments and the longer stories of those who chose to call the seaside home, the clubs and sports hubs that border the big blue as well as the rusty infrastructure that frames it. And of course the sea itself—always present, always changing.
Part of the 2024 Cultural Olympiad, the artistic and cultural arm of the Parisian Olympic games, the exhibition belongs to a wave of projects across France that bring art and sports into conversation. It is the healing presence of the sea on body and mind and its strong influence on the people that live around it that unites these five projects. Whether it’s the visitors to the rocky inlets (or ‘calanques’) of Marseille or La Ciotat, the members of the disabled sports associations at the Base Nautique de Corbière or Pointe Rouge or the FC Martigues football team fan clubs (UM21 and Maritima Supra), the photographers explore the ways in which the Mediterranean flows into, and enriches, different communities.
This patchwork coast begins with the city’s rocky seafront photographed by Julia Gat for her series Mare Internum. Taking its name from the Roman description of the Mediterranean sea, which also means ‘internal sea,’ her cluster of diary-esque images documents the daily routines that play out against the ever-changing littoral backdrop, enjoyed by its inhabitants and visitors alike. In one typical Marseille scene, a woman perches on one of the many rocks that line the coastal edge—providing lounging spots to whoever gets there first—while friends bathe in the water, the city’s buildings and more crowds just visible in the distance underneath a thin layer of mist.
Capturing its many moods, from a dramatic cloudy sky to the sun dancing on the water and the warm blush of golden hour, Gat strolls down by the sea with curiosity and tenderness for her fellow wanderers, whose moods also alternate. Some stand peacefully looking out at the sea alone, others sprint into or leap through the frame, charged by the sun. Whether there for solitude or to connect, her subjects all share the collective public space of the shoreline.
The power of the collective, brought together through mutual passion, surges through Simon Bouillère’s Maritima Ultra. Centered on the devoted fanclubs of the football team FC Martigues, UM21 and Maritima Supra—the Roman for ‘superior sea,’ a nod to Martigues’ coastal location—his bright images erupt with match energy. The Stade Francis-Turcan is where the event unfurls, the photographer masterfully building the tension of the game through a series of small details and moments.
Loudspeakers, flags, rows of cups, well-worn red seats gesture towards the drama of the game without actually showing it. Red smoke trickles out of a flare near the exit, white smoke clouds a member of the audience’s face. Only a few images show the crowd, clad in the team’s colors of red and gold, arms up in the air mid-game or hanging around with a sense of expectancy.
Community is also the focus of Maude Grübel’s images, which document the way handicapped people use the beaches at the Base Nautique de la Pointe Rouge and Corbieres. Handicapped herself, Grübel joined the Avi Sourire club, an organization that teaches rowing and inclusion through making sport accessible to all, looking to explore the relationship between her body and others. What she encountered through her experience was the joy, solidarity and teamwork that the club enabled.
Point de vue – Faire Corps (Point view – To Become One) invites us to look at how different bodies use the sea through a collection of portraits of people Grübel met, landscapes and small details of the devices installed to help handicapped people benefit from the beach. Grübel’s photographs play with stillness and motion; a body cast in stone next to the foamy remnants of a wave, a rock caged by a metallic fence next to the back of someone looking out to sea, hair caught in the wind. In these small dialogues between images, a sense of freedom emerges.
Turning his camera on one of the most irresistible photographic clichés of all time—the sunset—Pierre Girardin’s photos seem like a spectacle next to the quiet poetry of Grübel’s work. But the usual soft, aesthetic shades of pinks and purples of the picturesque view are nowhere to be seen here. Here, the sun’s final event of the day feels more like an alert than a natural occurrence, the colors intensified by pollution to produce a startling reddy orange. As if the sky had been set on fire, industrial structures, cruise liners and city streets are bathed for a brief moment in a beautiful yet ominous light as human activity merges with nature’s cycles.
A curious family story with roots in World War II and a restaurant by the sea in the present rounds off the exhibition. In Françoise Beauguion’s tapestry of text, archival images and photographs taken during the commission, a fairytale-esque story is told of two friends whose lives slip in and out of each other’s orbit before coming into union around one body of water; the Figuerolles Calanque in La Ciotat. Charles and Igor met each other in the Franco-Russian Normandie-Niemen army that was formed in 1942 with Stalin to fight Nazism on the eastern border. After going their separate ways post-war, they found each other back in the South of France.
Charles was stationed in Aix-en-Provence while Igor and his wife had fallen in love with the magnetic draw of a small rocky beach in the small naval town of La Ciotat where they bought a house and opened a restaurant in 1956. Amidst the calanque’s strange rock formations, ‘Chez Tania’ became a much-loved meeting spot. An ‘Independent Republic of Figuerolles’ was even declared to celebrate this unique slice of sea and land, running an hour out of time from the rest of France. Eventually Charles’ son married Igor’s daughter, and their son Gregory runs the restaurant—and the republic—to this day.
An ode to the Mediterranean, Seasides celebrates the beauty of the sea, its cultural influence and its curative effect on the people that visit and use it. And the one project that touches on what we give back in return—the excessive fumes of all our human activities wrapped up in Pierre Girardin’s glowing orange sunsets—acts as a powerful reminder of our impact on the environment and the care it is due for all it gives to us.
Editor’s note: Seasides is on view as part of the Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival 2024 until 29 September.