Cyrille Weiner, Les longs Murs, from PRIVATE 49 – FRANCE présences
[T]he series The long Walls was made in 2004-2005 in the framework of a public commission aimed at documenting the heavy urban changes linked to the ‘Euroméditerranée’ project in Marseille. The photographs offer a realistic and documentary that stops in the specific space and time of one of the most important urban transformation projects in Europe. The photographs fix places that the new development will transform, thus interfering with the relations between men and their city. In the heart of a city crossed by numerous boundaries, just like the Mediterranean sea, the representation of Marseille civility does have an influence: exile, nostalgia, mingling, relegation and conviviality.These photographs cross an urban-harbour territory that physically exist: a shore band comprised between Arenc and the esplanade of the Fort Saint-Jean, into an imaginary one. A continuum of situations and sensations surmounted by the in between figure. The departure and the coming back. The waiting that separates them. The town, the port and their porous limits. Work and leisure and the lost time of a break. The scenes represented along the course, allow the filtering of intermingled layers of intimate life of anonymous people and the unreal associated to this city. Symbolic characters emerge from nudity and decorum, from the fence and the walking up and down.
