Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.

Invisible archives

Education: community project

The Education and Mediation programme of Manifesta derives from the research of existent knowledges and practices of civic initiatives and various city’s ecosystems.

The urban development of Marseille bred fragmentation, consequently generating diverse subcultures, and self-organised initiatives, that the urbanistic project itself paradoxically often excluded.

The histories of these initiatives provided us with a genealogy, that is alternative and challenging to the city’s “mainstream” discourses. It helped understanding current societal and urban dynamics and conflicts of the city.

Invisible Archives is a sequence of eight exhibitions and public programmes which explored genealogies and non-institutional memories of civil initiatives, histories of resilience and community synergies originated and located in particular areas of Marseille. The project took place in 2019 – 2020 as part of Tiers Programme of Manifesta 13 Marseille.

Proposed by the Education team of Manifesta 13, Tiers Programme (Third Programme) is a mediation initiative between the curatorial programme and the citizens of Marseille. One of its projects, Invisible Archives, used the framework of the biennial to introduce a third perspective in order to nourish discussions on the building of symbolic and imaginary representations of the city and the actions that create its multiple realities.

Selected archives were used as starting points for artistic reflection, in the form of a dialogue, claiming the recognition of these extraordinary examples of citizen initiatives as a common heritage which is often invisible and ignored by institutions. A sequence of eight exhibitions and public programmes took place over a year 2019 - 2020 at the headquarters of Tiers Programme – Tiers QG, a former snack adjoining student lodgings in Belsunce neighbourhood.