Manifesta 13 Marseille

By its very inhabitants. Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous, 2000-2010

The association Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous (a City Center for all) was created in November 2000 by Nouredine Abouakil, then director of Inter Service Migrants, who was its spokesperson from 2000 to 2010, Christian Deleusse, civil servant and Patrick Lacoste, urban planner. The association denounces the illegality of the methods implemented as part of the transformation of downtown Marseille, which particularly affect Maghrebis retirees living in furnished hotels in the Belsunce neighbourhood (next to Marseille’s railway station). At their side, as with the inhabitants of the rue de la République, the association acted for a rehabilitation for the benefit of all, old and new inhabitants of Marseille. The association, which is quickly enriched by strong skills in law and urban planning, then produces a vast corpus of documents: urban analyzes, judgments and case law, studies and collaborations with researchers, proposals, petitions, inquiries… Daniel Carrière, president of the association for many years, made these resources available to all, in the form of a website that has become a constitutive and complementary tool of activist action.

Through her exhibition, Martine Derain, herself an active member of the association from 2003 to 2011, offers to dive into the history of these actions. She suggests resonances between trials, documents, films and artistic interventions – occasionally rediscovering her own video recordings made in Belsunce, Noailles and Rue de la République. The archives of the association allow a better understanding of the sad housing situation in Marseille’s city centre. The exhibition is activated through public meetings throughout this month of July, in order to find ways to get out of it…

UN CENTRE-VILLE POUR TOUS

The Un Center-Ville pour Tous association was originally created by Nouredine Abouakil, Christian De Leusse and Patrick Lacoste to protect the rights of poor and elderly workers living in indecent conditions in the Belsunce neighborhood. Un Center-Ville pour Tous then followed all the urban rehabilitation operations in the degraded districts of the heart of Marseille from 2000 to 2010. A new generation of activists is now in charge of the association’s activities.

Martine Derain

Martine Derain, born in 1960, is an artist and publisher. She enjoys working in dialogue and collectively. From 2000 to 2004, she shared the experience of La Compagnie, an artist’s studio located in downtown Marseille. This is where she crossed paths with the association Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous, which defends the rights of old workers from Algeria and the Maghreb. This complicity led her in 2004 to work with the association alongside the residents of rue de la République, threatened with eviction as part of the ongoing rehabilitation process. At the same time, she was leading a photographic “campaign” on the transformation of the street and was part of the research team mandated by the Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture (Paris) to analyse this exemplary mobilization.

In order to give an account of this action associating inhabitants, artists, activists and researchers, she created in 2010 Les éditions commune publishing house. Several publications have since been produced, including the Hospitality Tales of the cooperative Hotel du Nord with Christine Breton, honorary heritage curator, and the Cinema Hors Capital(e) collection with Jean-François Neplaz, filmmaker.

From 2011 to 2013, she was artistic director of the Creative District (Quartier Créatif) of l’Abeille in La Ciotat, an artist residency and participative programme of Marseille-Provence 2013, European capital of culture, where she invited the group of filmmakers Film flame to make fiction films in a working class neighborhood and the dance company Ex Nihilo to lead creations and workshops there. She still works with these two associations, while continuing to publish with many artists and researchers.