Water flows throughout our bodies and our cities. Any water spilt here will inevitably be drunk elsewhere. Its movements are trans-national, trans-species and trans-corporal. It binds us to a complex ecology spanning the entire planet. Port cities like Marseille have always been structured by comings and goings, ebbs and flows. Positioned on the front line of the ecological emergency, they are especially suited to nurturing a new sense of our interconnectedness and the new forms of responsibility that must emerge.
The Park: Becoming a Body of Water takes the fountains flanked by two connected museums – the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille and the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle – as a symbol of transformation and interconnectedness. Flowing outwards, it encompasses the Palais Longchamp, a former palace celebrating the arrival of drinkable water, the Consigne Sanitaire built in the 17th century to examine sailors arriving Marseille for signs of infectious disease and the forgotten Citerne des Moulins in Le Panier.
Like the water coursing through these buildings, The Park: Becoming a Body of Water dissolves the simplistic binaries between nature and culture, sentient and non-sentient, proposing de-colonial ecologies that reveal the complex inter-dependencies between all forms of life, from humans to algae.
Participants: Peter Fend* (1950, US)
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