Marseille : Ascents and Descents
Detail of stairs at Saint-Charles train station, 2025. Image commissioned for frieze. Photograph: Francois Ollivier
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.
A skateboarding event at La Friche Belle de Mai, a hybrid space located in La Belle de Mai, 2025. Image commissioned for frieze. Courtesy: © Friche la Belle de Mai; photograph: Francois Ollivier
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.
Unité d’Habitation, designed by Le Corbusier, Boulevard Michelet, 2025. Courtesy: © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025; photograph: Francois Ollivier
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’
