Les Aygalades

Marseille, seen from the north, is a patchwork held together by accident. In the spring of 2005 I worked sur le motif in Les Aygalades for several weeks, returning each day to the same blindspot: a scrap of ground invisible from the road above and the housing estates below, where the ruins of pastoral activity — collapsed drystone walls, abandoned terraces — press against the roadside. Behind them, the quartiers nord rise like a backdrop that refuses to stay in the background. This is the Marseille roman noir: not picturesque, just a zone where the city forgets to narrate itself.

Charcoal was the right medium because it operates like the place itself — it marks, it erodes, it holds the dust of its own making. Each session added a layer; each layer was partially rubbed back by wind, by grit, by the doubt that comes with looking again at the same thing. Merleau-Ponty, writing on Cézanne, understood this: that repetition is not redundancy but deepening, that the landscape refuses to resolve itself and must be approached as a relationship rather than a view. Les Aygalades thinks itself in charcoal — patchwork, blindspot, ruin, and all.