“A day to never forget! I went to the prison Les Baumettes. With a group of Kedge Business School students. And they co-created their dreams for their city, together with a group of young prisoners. All young people from Marseille.
Zinedine, Anaïs, Lebon, Etienne, Mohamed, Justine (x2), Ayoub, Margaux, Miguel, Rania, José, Aurélie, Mouhsinne, Mathilde. They co-designed for our “Tour de Tous les Possibles” new possibles for Marseille within the topic “Marseille Authentique”, they chose from Le Grand Puzzle, the urban study by MVRDV for Manifesta Biennial
“Joyeux” and “espoir” are two words I heard from our participants after the workshop. They had a lot of fun, this new alliance of young people from Marseille.”

“What a great morning! Bring two very diverse groups together who don’t know each other: today the employees of Acta Vista and a group of residents of the 7th arrondissement. And let them come up with the “Possibles” for Marseille. From Le Grand Puzzle they chose together the theme “accessible Marseille” and the results were amazing and even emotional. Le Paquebot Radieux, Vert-O-Route, 2030 Zero Voiture. I dream of a city where very diverse groups of citizens together see and propose all the possibilities. Still 21 workshops to go! What an energy.”

Marseille invents Le Tour de Tous les Possibles

From Le Grand Puzzle… to the Great Mosaic 

A project commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille as part of the pre-biennial research project, designed and directed by Joke Quintens and Tarik Ghezali in collaboration with Marseille Solutions and Ouishare.

“What happens when you mix people from Marseille who are not used to meeting each other? When they are allowed to free their imaginations? When they cooperate to shape the future of their city together? We don’t know, because it has never been done before. 

Le Tour de Tous les Possibles is a travelling project bringing together people from Marseille from all walks of life to imagine new possibilities for their city. It is a question of giving them carte blanche on the future of Marseille by betting on collective and citizen intelligence. It is part of Manifesta*, a European nomadic biennial festival whose cultural programme will start in June 2020. Various exhibitions, performances, conferences and screenings will highlight some of the most pressing issues and themes in Marseille, the 13th host city of the biennale. 

For 6 months, from December 2019 to April 2020, 500 people from Marseille will participate in creative workshops to exchange and produce together bold and original ideas and projects. To stimulate discussion, our methodology is based on excerpts from the Grand Puzzle*, a study produced by the Dutch architectural firm MVRDV for Manifesta. In its conclusion, this unpublished portrait of the city of Marseille makes ambitious proposals to improve the lives of its inhabitants: an invitation to dream big!

These creative workshops will take place all over the city, and will bring together, always in a unique place, participants (from all neighbourhoods, ages, genders, origins…) mobilized by about fifty partner networks (citizens, associations, economic,…). 

Above all, this Tour is a wonderful pretext for us to connect people from Marseille whose paths do not cross and to build new relationships, alliances, “traits d’union.s” (theme of this 13th biennial).

Thus, gradually, as the meetings progress, a real “Mosaic” of a Marseille of all possibilities will emerge, the innovative story of a 21st century Marseille imagined with its inhabitants… All the proposals resulting from the Tour will of course be a precious material that will be highlighted during a permanent exhibition during the Manifesta season, which will highlight the Great Puzzle and its metamorphosis into a Great Mosaic. 

Project initiators: Joke Quintens & Tarik Ghezali in collaboration with Marseille Solutions and Ouishare.

About the project team

Tarik Ghezali: for 20 years, he has been “manufacturing We” in Marseille, France and the Mediterranean. With many organizations (public, business, non-profit), he works to imagine and bring to life ideas and projects to repair society’s many divisions. With a strong belief, at the heart of the Tour : to recreate an inclusive “common box” for society, we need to think and act “out of the box” ! 

Joke Quintens is convinced that we can only build a city together. As a designer and facilitator of participation and co-creation in cities, she works daily on this “togetherness”. With Wetopia, she is experimenting with new alliances within and between civil society and policy makers in Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa and Marseille.

Ouishare is an international collective of entrepreneurs who decipher society transformations and experiment with new ways of working, innovating and collaborating. Our core expertise: bringing together actors and thinkers of the ecosystem, analysing the strategic challenges of collaborative transformations and developing innovative mechanisms to experiment and support new practices.

Marseille Solutions is a factory with social innovation projects in the Aix-Marseille Provence metropolitan area. Our mission: to imagine, develop and/or support solutions that provide new solutions to old problems in the region (unemployment, isolation, early school leaving, poverty, waste, etc.). We work at 360 degrees with all types of actors: companies, associations, government and local authorities, foundations, universities, citizens…

About Manifesta Manifesta is the European Nomadic Biennale, created after the fall of the Berlin Wall to unite Europe culturally. Every two years, Manifesta moves to a new “host” city, to work with local actors to build a 5-month cultural programme (exhibitions, performances, conferences, screenings, etc.) that highlights some of the most pressing issues or themes in the host city, Marseille in 2020. These themes, which are relevant to the people of Marseille, are also themes that are echoed throughout Europe and potentially around the world. To address or highlight these themes, Manifesta invites artists from all over the world, ranging from local practitioners to international specialists. Manifesta therefore invites its visitors to discover a range of themes related to Marseille, Europe and the World through the eyes of artists. 

About the Great Puzzle  Since its last edition, Manifesta has decided to commission a pre-biennial research study from an internationally renowned architectural firm. Manifesta has evolved from a monodisciplinary visual arts exhibition into a cultural platform that conducts in-depth research on the host city and can serve as a basis for the development of the biennale. This work is carried out with the help of local actors who are deconstructing the city, its complexity and possibilities. Le Grand Puzzle, the study of the Marseille edition, “looks at Marseille” from different angles, it questions the city’s inhabitants and tries to sketch both how the city is built and how it can potentially change in the future. The Great Puzzle is not only a basis on which the commissioners of Manifesta 13 Marseille can build the biennale, it is also a tool for the people of Marseille to look at their city.