Street art in Marseille
This is where the project was born, and it is the only city we will write about like this. Here are the walls we know, what you actually see on them, and what this page will not say.
Why only one city
A page per city would be padding: you would write the same thing fifteen times with different street names, and it would show. Marseille is the one exception we allow ourselves, because it is where the first stickers came from and because the author has been looking at these walls for far longer than he has been building websites.
What follows is not a ranking or a walking tour. It is what we know from having seen it, with the limits of someone who walks around one city.
Cours Julien, and what you only see once
It is the epicentre, and nobody argues about that. The walls of Cours Julien have been painted since the late 1980s, and the thickness shows: in places the paint has built up until the mouldings of the facade disappeared under it.
The area has the particularity of being covered from the ground to the first floor, with no transition between shopfronts and walls. The Bouches-du-Rhône department funded a campaign across a large part of the shop and restaurant fronts, which is why some facades are obviously commissioned and others obviously not.
The staircase running down towards the Canebière is the most photographed piece of the city. It is also the least durable: it changes several times a year. What you will see is not what was in the photo that made you want to go, and that is the whole point of going.
Le Panier, quieter and slower
The old quarter, the one that predates the modern port. The streets there are too narrow for large surfaces, so the work is smaller: stencils, paste-ups, painted doors, and a lot of things at eye level.
Around the Vieille Charité you find large frescoes signed by locals — Nhobi and Seek 313 put up fishermen, sardines and a Bonne Mère there, which is to say exactly the imagery the city gives itself.
It is the busiest of the three districts, and therefore the most stable: what is painted here lasts longer than at Cours Julien.
La Friche la Belle de Mai
The former tobacco factory, turned into a cultural venue. It is not a free expression wall: it is a site where painting is part of the programme, with frescoes, stencils and paste-ups by artists from all over.
The difference matters to anyone coming to look. At Cours Julien you read an accumulation; at La Friche you read chosen pieces, made with the time and the wall they needed. Both are street art, and they are not the same gesture.
The large murals, elsewhere in the city
Marseille also has painted walls that are not decorative at all. Mahn Kloix, based here since 2011, works on what he calls popular portraits: faces of real people, painted large, carrying the story they carry.
His portrait of Tursunay Ziawudun, a Uyghur survivor, covers two hundred square metres of a building facade on rue Félix-Pyat. It is neither in a tourist district nor on any trail, and that is deliberate.
We mention it for a precise reason: the question «where can I see street art in Marseille» has a wider answer than three districts, and a mural that size is announced nowhere.
The hills, where there is nothing to see
Above the city, the villages clinging to the hills — Allauch and its windmills, the roads climbing up — have no street art. No mural, no wall, nothing to photograph.
And yet that is where the project's first stickers came from. A square of paper on a surface that belongs to nobody, at eye level, in a place where nobody is looking for anything: that was the way to do street art without damaging anything, and it has not changed.
If you go up, go up for the view. The rest gets scanned by accident, or not at all.
What this page will never say
Where a sticker is. Not one, nowhere, neither here nor anywhere else on the site.
The rule is not mysterious: a sticker whose address gets published stops being found and starts being visited. The project rests entirely on the fact that whoever scans first stumbled onto it rather than being sent there. Publishing a map of placements would remove the one thing holding the whole thing together.
The site's map says which countries stickers have been scanned in, and stops there. That is deliberate, it is explained, and it will not change.
If you are going with stickers
The two legal cases hold in Marseille as everywhere: a surface meant for free posting, or the wall owner's agreement. The city has free posting boards spread across several districts, and walls where painting is accepted — the Cours Julien staircase is one of them.
Outside those two cases, putting something up is still criminal damage, including in a district that is covered end to end. A painted wall is not a free wall: it is painted because somebody had permission, or because somebody did not.
And the rule that is not in the law but counts just as much: you do not cover someone else's work. Five centimetres of paper stuck over a finished piece is going over, and it is paid for the same way everywhere.