Securing affordable housing leads artists to seek out urban neighborhoods sometimes reputed to be gritty. As noted in an earlier post featuring street art in Marseille, the creative vitality they bring is transformative. Quirky shops pop up. Inventive chefs open outlier cafes and restaurants with tables spilling out onto the sidewalks.
Walls once covered with threatening-looking, unauthorized tagging get reupholstered with a layer of more artistic grafitti. As a result, two of the most fun neighborhoods to explore in Marseille are Le Panier and Cours Julien, both uphill from the harbor.
Surrendering to urban artists, Marseille embraced them in 2018. The government launched an ambitious partnership with a group of artists, Massilia Graffiti, organizers of a successful street art festival in the Cours Julien area. Forty-thousand euros of public funds were invested in an innovative program to combat les tags sauvages, or wild tagging.
Business owners were invited to have their oft-tagged facades repainted by teams of artists at no cost. Agreeable owners were then assigned a team of artists by the cooperative. Each owner apprised the team of the character of his or her business, and then the artists returned with proposals for consideration.
A few of the grab-bag of images below appear the colorful result of those efforts. Graffiti that once appeared sauvage appears tamed by adjacent authorized art into a kaleidoscopic streetscape enticing exploration.
We explored. We sat and sipped. And we ate well.
To pinpoint locations for spotting the ever-evolving street art scene in Marseille, visit the website of the tourism office.
Postcards from Barton Springs 