Marseille opened wide its ports, its stages and its memories at the launch on May 15 of the 2026 Mediterranean Season, a vast artistic-diplomatic project launched by Emmanuel Macron three years earlier, supported by the French Institute with the support of RFI and France Media Monde. This edition highlights five countries linked to France by their common history: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon.
The geopolitical context is electric. Borders are closing, identity discourses are flourishing and the migration debate is intensifying everywhere. Faced with this situation, the Mediterranean Season chose the reverse shot. Where States talk about controlling migratory flows, artists talk about circulation and transmissions.
As artistic director, independent general curator and director Julie Kretzschmar is betting on stories long relegated to the margins. Those of mixed heritages, displaced memories. A programming that refuses facade exoticism and prefers to give voice to what conflicts, wars, exiles and political fractures try to erase, namely languages, daily gestures, imaginations and lives, of course.
Colonial and postcolonial memories
The works presented traverse colonial and postcolonial memories without detour. A Lebanese actress thus recounts the chaos of her country through a simple tabbouleh recipe. A kitchen as an intimate archive of a territory in ruins. Further, the Palestinian artist Shareef Sarhan reconstructed a debris tower destroyed by an Israeli tank in 2023. This raw installation, crossed by the war, will circulate between Marseille, Bordeaux and Montpellier.
The opening ceremony on May 15 brought together Camelia Jordana and Sofiane Saidi, king of a raï rid of folkloric clichés. A musical inauguration in the image of the event: hybrid and political.
The Saison Méditerranée 2026there are more than 200 events between exhibitions, concerts and performances in 60 French cities and around the Mediterranean until October 31, 2026.
Listen to 8 billion neighborsInitiatives to get Mediterranean societies moving
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