Revisiting Provence, July 2026

A few years ago (I don't remember if it was just before COVID or just after), at any dinner in Paris you could be sure you'd find someone looking into moving to Arles or Marseille. The professionals and gallery people were buying flats or opening Airbnbs or boutique hotels in Arles, while the hard-up artists were drawn to cheap housing and studios in a sunny, messy place by the sea: Marseille.

I used to spend some time in Provence every year in the 80s, staying at Les Baux during summer holidays in France. Arles, I knew from that time, is one of the nicest towns in the area. My acquaintance with Marseille was more limited: basically, I knew the station and the Old Port, and that was it. But both towns have undergone quite a renaissance since then, in terms both of trendiness and of contemporary art. The phenomena are, I suppose, linked.

I'd been on the odd business visit, or passed through Marseille on the way to somewhere else, but I hadn't even visited the MUCEM museum of European and Mediterranean civilizations since it opened well over ten years ago, Marseille's still-older MAC, or LUMA in Arles.

Mamali Shafahi and Domenico Gutknecht, a pair of artists I've already written about on this blog, now have a studio in Marseille, near the Friche la Belle de Mai, a former industrial complex (tobacco: Gauloises and Gitanes) converted, like so many elsewhere, into a culture centre. I was already aware of it, since Mamali's sister, Melika Shafahi, a photographer, had been in residence there and done a project involving the local youngsters. Mamali and Domenico had been insisting for some time I should come and visit. So at last I did, over nearly a week of discovery and rediscovery. The point of this article is just to make a record of the trip, so I don't forget when it was and what I saw, and post some photos to jog my memory.

On my first morning, rather than plunging into the 'new' Marseille, I set off with Mamali to an olive grove near Bandol, to witness, under a blazing sun, some final tweaks to the installation of his monumental, blue-flocked Hereditary Fountain. I wrote about the fountain when it was displayed in Paris, in the courtyard at 3537 during the DAWA group show, in 2023. Seeing it tucked away in the hills, among the olives, was like coming across some disconcerting form of ancient sanctuary.

The location is private, but the owners will be inviting collectors, curators, museum people, gallery-owners and the like there during this year's Art-o-Rama, in August.

That afternoon, in the same baking heat, Mamali and Domenico took me to discover an extraordinary place I had no idea existed, La Vieille Charité, a former almshouse and hospice in the Panier, Marseille's oldest and quaintest neighbourhood. I did know Le Panier existed, but had never been taken on a stroll round it before. The Charité, where three quite austere levels of galleries (recalling de Chirico) surround an oval, domed, late-17th-century chapel, is now a museum and culture centre, showing, at the moment, Dormir comme le soleil,  a large-scale installation centred on billowing, pastel-coloured fabrics, by Adrien Vescovi.

I took in so much during this trip that I no longer know what order some parts of it were in. Walking around, I saw extravagant 19th-century monuments quite new to me - the Palais Longchamp, for example, and we ate out on noisy, untidy squares that reminded me of Athens. We visited the Friche la Belle de Mai and the MUCEM, and saw all their exhibitions. But at La Friche there was a lot of video playing to nobody in vast, dark halls, not my thing, so I was more impressed by the place and its potential than what's in it right now. And while what I saw at the Mucem seemed beautifully, even lavishly, displayed and lit, it wasn't actually as interesting as it was supposed to be - Les Bonnes Mères, their rambling show about every conceivable aspect of motherhood, obstetric instruments included, especially. Perhaps I wasn't in the mood for parsing curatorial concepts. So I find myself with not a single photo.

Where I did however take a couple was at the Double V gallery, the Paris branch of which I already knew, where it was a pleasure to find ever-welcoming owner Nicolas Veidig-Favarel himself on duty.

On Sunday we drove to Malmousque, a lively neighbourhood overlooking the Mediterranean, for lunch (known in trendy areas as 'brunch', but all that means in France is lunch with a lot of spoilt toddlers rocked in their high-tech pushchairs by bearded dads). The venue was La Traverse, where Catherine Bastide, formerly in Brussels (the late David Caille had his first posthumous exhibition, a group show called Forever Young, at her gallery in 2014) has opened a new showroom with a little open-air restaurant in its sunny courtyard. The exhibition there, Arnaud Eubelen, The Practice of Every Day Life, was made up of interesting furniture and accessories constructed out of things found on the streets of Brussels and elsewhere.

From there, we went to Marseille's museum of contemporary art, the MAC. My friends and guides were sternly critical of both the building and the exhibitions inside it but, even if, once again, I didn't really grasp the curators' concepts, I personally enjoyed the visit, and was especially pleased, as ever, to come across works on display by young artists who are now friends.

On my last full day, we drove to Arles. I hadn't been there for about 35 years, so of course hadn't seen either of the places our visit focused on: the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, and LUMA.

The Van Gogh foundation is currently showing SUSPECTS - Van Gogh, Tricksters & Co., an exhibition, as they put it, 'devoted to artists who, following Vincent van Gogh, have chosen dissidence over conformity and excess over restraint.' This was (leaving aside spending time with Mamali and Domenico, around Marseille and in their studio) the highlight of my trip: a punchy exhibition, punchily curated, and again with works by someone dear to me - in this case Mathis Collins. Though Van Gogh was no slouch, either.

We'd also hoped, while in Arles, to take in a little exhibition of work by another friend, Pooya Abbasian, but heavy rainstorms had played havoc with the gallery's electrical installations, so for safety, while awaiting repair, it was shut. We had lunch instead, in a good veggie place facing the amphitheatre, and then walked, hugging the walls for shade, to LUMA.

Again, I'd never been there before, and I admit I'd had no idea that LUMA was not just a knobbly, glittering tower by Frank Gehry, inspired, so I read, by Van Gogh's starry paintings, and the knobbly Alpilles mountain range that features in his work, but a much, much bigger complex landscaped - with long grasses and a pond - around vast and now impressively restored railway rolling-stock workshops. 

Unfortunately, as at La Friche, I was more inspired by the place and its generous spaces than what is, just now, on display in it, though some colourful photos by Martin Parr caught my eye, and in the bookshop I picked up a book about Neïl Beloufa, called People Love War Data and Travels. Leafing through it, I found photos of Mamali and his mum inside, dating back to Neïl's exhibition in the very early days of the Pejman Foundation's Argo Factory in Tehran, so of course, I had to have it.

So that was the souvenir I took back to Paris.