The history of Street Art at the Cours Julien

The Cours Julien district

We met at 2pm at the entrance to the Notre Dame du Mont metro station. When I arrived, the guide, Alexandra, was there and gave me a very warm welcome. The weather was fine and the tour was looking good.

Little by little, all the participants arrived, all accompanied by children or teenagers, the visit being presented as family-friendly and fun.

Once all the participants had arrived, Alexandra asked them a few questions: where were they from, did they know Marseilles, did they know the area, and what were the principles and aims of street art?

A cultural crossroads, Marseille is also a mosaic of one hundred and eleven districts. Each has its own history, atmosphere and traditions. Cours Julien is one of them, and it tells many stories. Now recognised as a haven for designers and artists, this popular district has become the cradle of street art. Many of the shops, restaurants and bars here have commissioned a street artist to create works on their shopfronts.

What stories are told in the ‘quartier des créateurs’?

The tour gets off to an entertaining start, with the guide listening to the answers of the youngest visitors, all keen to discover the history of street art and the history of the ‘Cours-Ju’ district, as it is known here in Marseille.

Here, street art illuminates and gives life to the district. Today, it represents the identity of the Cours Julien.

It’s time to look up and listen to our passionate guide.

Art at the heart of this popular district

An open-air art gallery

We began our visit with a little game: find the works of Space Invader, an artist who has created small mosaics that can be seen all over the city and the district. A delighted child found one, and our guide began to explain this very special artist and his 80 works around Marseille.

Alexandra’s explanations of the district and its history were very interesting. The Cours Julien is a rebel neighbourhood, a haven for artists, hipsters and many of Marseille’s students.

Every bit of graffiti has its own story, and it’s important to emphasise that. Almost nothing is done at random, we are told, and almost everything has a meaning.

Some of the participants start asking if it’s all legal. ‘No, not all of it’ replies our guide, but she is keen to point out that urban art is much more than appreciated here, and that it is even nurtured, a real strength for this working-class neighbourhood.

Little by little, we continue our tour, the eyes of the children taking part in the visit are fascinated, the guide asks them questions that they love to answer, and that makes for a really warm atmosphere.

Some of the works here are ephemeral. We are told that some are erased by time, others by the city, and many are simply replaced by another artist. In other words, an artist uses a work to create his own, and the one that was there before takes on a whole new face.

It’s the hard law of street art!

Landmark works

The visit is marked by a number of stops around the landmark works on the Cours Julien.

To begin with, we approach the imposing silhouette tagged by the artist Lapin Thur in 2015 during the Street Art Festival, which is in perfect symbiosis with its surrounding environment. Everything seems calculated, and yet… The history of this work is told to us perfectly, and the guide asks lots of questions about what we’re seeing and what it means.

We continue our tour along the famous colourful staircases of the Cours-Julien. It’s up to us to spot the most significant ones, and to talk about the ones we like best and the ones that stand out.

After stopping at the staircases, the tour continues with the history of many frescoes by artists of varying fame.

To mention the most famous, we admire those of Mr CHAT (Mr CAT), who puts a smile on the faces of the children taking part in the tour, who of course ask: ‘But why a cat?’ I can’t tell you, but if you want to find out, come along on our guided tour!

Walls tell stories

We then passed the huge fresco by Mahn Kloix and his giant tortoise, ‘Man VS Wild’. This fresco particularly captivated and impressed me, not only because of the technical nature and beauty of the work, but also because of the message the artist wanted to get across about the environment.

The tour continued, as the works and their stories unfolded one after the other, and the guide continued to ask us questions about our different interpretations and points of view of each one.

We end the tour with a young artist whom I found particularly gifted, and who has managed to make her mark in the often male-dominated world of urban art: Manyoly. Known for putting unfamiliar faces on the streets and bringing them to life with their vivid colours and realistic features, Manyoly is an artist who, personally, has totally won me over!

Unfortunately, I can’t talk about all the works I saw that day, otherwise this article would be far too long! But what I can say for sure is that, as a Marseillaise, I’d never taken the time to understand the world of street art on the Cours Julien, so I was content to just walk past, stopping from time to time when my eyes were drawn to a fresco.

The environment, love, positivity, but also sadness, homage, denunciation and disappointment – Alexandra was absolutely right, almost every mural in the area has a story to tell.