The down-and-out fellow who, after nightfall, sells his books on the corner of the rue de la Republique and the Vieux Port, awakens bad instincts in the passers-by. They feel tempted to make use of so much fresh misery. And they long to learn more about such nameless misfortune than the mere image of catastrophe that it presents to us. For what extremity must have brought a man to spill out such books as he has left on the asphalt before him, and to hope that a passer-by will be seized at this late hour by a desire to read? Or is it all quite different? And does a poor soul here keep vigil, mutely beseeching us to lift the treasure from the ruins? We hasten by. But we shall falter again at every corner, for everywhere the southern peddler has so pulled his beggar's coat around him that fate looks at us from it with a thousand eyes. How far we are from the sad dignity of our poor, the war-disabled of competition, on whom tags and tins of boot blacking hang like braid and medals.

Marseille, une transitopie offrant des voies de sortie au projet européen, a été, au cours du siècle dernier, le port d'attache d'une diversité d'agents étrangers, et donc le témoin de multiples ruines intellectuelles. En collaboration avec des artistes internationaux, nous transformerons ces agents étrangers en guides touristiques, oscillant entre leurs anticipations et nos rétrospections, entre le regard de l'entre-deux-guerres et le cadre du Marseille contemporain. L’objectif de cet anachronisme est de confronter les luttes locales et européennes croissantes pour les récits perdus ou alternatifs, tout en examinant le (post)fascisme ré-émergent de notre époque. Dans cette optique, la série d’essais vidéo repose sur le concept d’une mémoire multidirectionnelle : un carrefour où se croisent différentes histoires de violence et de marginalisation, contribuant à définir la grammaire culturelle, urbaine et imaginaire de Marseille au XXIe siècle. Dans cette optique, la série d’essais vidéo repose sur le concept d’une mémoire multidirectionnelle : un carrefour où se croisent différentes histoires de violence et de marginalisation, contribuant à définir la grammaire culturelle, urbaine et imaginaire de Marseille au XXIe siècle.

Conceptual commentary by Sophia Buck, team-member of the project What makes the imagination and imaging of Paradise (in exile à La Marseillais)? The miniature ‘Rue Paradis. Livre de Memoire’ explores this question by confronting two key moments in the trajectory of one key figure in the Armenian diaspora, Henri Verneuil: the aspirations and (intransparent) outlooks of arrival, for one, and the vortex and forms of memories, for another. Henri Verneuil (1920–2002), who would become one of the most commercially successful film directors in 20th century France, deboarded in the Marseille harbour in 1924 after fleeing from the genocide in Armenia. The miniature posits a circle: it invites Verneuil’s late recollections of his arrival and how this arriving implies projecting, i.e. superimposing imported goods of one’s imagination onto Marseille: hopes for, despairs about, expectations towards what the space and place of the destination in exile may offer. If to follow a Blochian inspiration, Verneuil’s imperative was the principle Paradise – literally the street he installed himself in. What started with projecting his imagination onto the city, finishes with the ‘projection’ of Verneuil’s late and biographically inspired films about his arrival onto the walls of the museum complex Mucem – pointing to the multidirectional processes of imagined and imaged projections, personal recollections and shared or institutional memory culture. The cinematic layout organises Verneuil’s memories through the vectors an achronological order: if to read the exhibited material as in a book – from left to right – then recollection come before collection of his experiences as a child in the film Mayrig (1991). A propos a peculiar Armenian cultural technique of memory practice, the miniature introduces a provocative comparison: the livre de memoire or Houshamadyan (Հուշամատյան) est un genre pluridisciplinaire apparu dans les années 1920, suite au génocide arménien et au déplacement de la population chrétienne de l'Empire ottoman. Il consiste á recréer des quartiers autochtones et des lieux abandonnés à travers des images, des dessins, les cartes (postales), des mots, des objects, bref, des collages de souvenirs lointains. But the backdrop of Verneuil’s moving images is not a book, it’s the urban landscape itself: the view onto contemporary Marseille either frames Verneuil’s filmic recollections, or is indeed framed by the porous walls of the museum. So is Verneuil’s œuvre a cinematic equivalent to the Armenian practice of composing memory books, i.e. memory films? Or is the city Marseille itself an urban memory ‘book’ for an Armenian diaspora – in that sense not the object of memory (maybe a second-degree memory), but the medium of memorizing, the space which collects and exhibits snippets of filmized/cinematized/filmic memory.