Under the cobblestones, the beach!

Over one weekend in late August, the Marseille-based project space festival Systema opened its fifth annual iteration. Continuing its role as host to networked project spaces, last year’s participants invited this year’s, many of whom are funded in and by German-speaking Europe. Twenty-one project spaces were invited to present distinct curatorial positions, each selecting artists to exhibit throughout the rooms or perform in the courtyard of the Palais Carli, a Beaux-Arts building formerly housing an art school, where the entirety of the festival took place. “Rembrandt,” “Michelangelo,” “Brunelleschi,” and their fellow art bros of yesteryear are inscribed in the stone frieze surrounding the interior of the courtyard. Dramatic lime green flags hung at the entrance of the palais during the festival period, signaling the exhibition and its contrast to the elitist and Eurocentric connotations of the building’s style and enshrined names. 

In the present day, Palais Carli houses a music conservatory most of the year, and the period rooms now mainly exist as spaces for study, practice, and rehearsal. Many of the hallways and classrooms include in-tune upright pianos. A neoclassical pipe organ and percussion set wait in storage behind a door with a porthole window (look but don’t touch!), emphasizing the space’s on-and-off-again accessibility. The fickle nature of the space’s availability made it nearly impossible for the festival’s committed organizers, Marseille–based art workers Won Jin Choi, Ryder Morey-Weale, and Lucas-Jacques Witz, to anticipate a specified curatorial strategy for situating the works in relation to one another, and the installation process continued to revise itself even through the start of the festival’s opening. 

The interrupted layout of the space nevertheless made for a delightfully confusing exploration, letting the untitled and concept-free exhibition unfold in fortuitous encounters. One found themself walking down a corridor, hitting a dead end, inversely returning back to its starting point, then going up at least three separate staircases to discover yet another room of artworks waiting in the wings. The conservatory’s woodwinds and string instruments of all sizes are kept throughout the building, and visitors happened upon them while navigating the exhibition. Site specificity is not part of Systema’s main tenets, yet its chosen venue fundamentally shaped the experience. The cacophony of many video works combined with passive echoes from the instruments and sounds from performances—including one in which artist Hugo Dinër gained coveted access to the space’s organ and piano—created the sonic backdrop for the end-of-summer attitudes of the contemporary art worker class. Discourse was promised in the festival press release, but in these chillax environs—ensured with four-euro wine and spontaneous frolics to the city beach—no one felt like engaging in anything too incisive. It was one of the rare weekends of the year when it was not a social faux pas to opt out of discussions of war and fascism. 

War surfaced, at most, as an abstraction. Fabian Ginsburg and Julia Eichler presented the book The Subject of Counter Revolution: Art, War, and the Public, published under their collective Strategien der Aufstandsbekämpfung (SdA, counterinsurgency strategies). The book aims to unpack semantic and conceptual qualities of war by examining the way they also appear in the art world. The analogy is meant to exemplify theory and praxis as inextricably bound in art and war. During their presentation, the authors introduced two key categories: “Institutional art” and “generic art.” Defined in relation to their project of naming strategies for counterinsurgency, “Institutional art” refers to art that relies on the institution to categorize itself as art, creating an insider-outsider paradigm which, by definition, excludes the private, intimate, insane, or criminal. “Generic art” seems to describe work that accidentally becomes art, without affirmation from experts, gatekeepers, or critical authorities, despite its inherent beauty and purpose. Together, these categories begin to sketch a relationship between art and war, suggesting the ways that both are shaped not only by representation but also by the institutional and conceptual structures through which each is recognized, defined, and made visible.

Closely examining which credentialed systems determine what gets to count as art is a trenchant and salient critique, especially at a festival that positions itself as marginal for taking place outside of the conventional art world calendar and in a city away from the major art world centers. Unlike Paris, New York, or London, Marseille derives its cultural capital precisely from the perception that it is marginal and moves at a different temporality. The city lacks the rigid formalities, glaring cultural codes, and professional hierarchies that mark those established centers. As such, Marseille can be misunderstood as a fertile environment for international discursive producers to experiment with the ways their import takes shape in different social and urban contexts. The relatively modest cost of living is a symptom of a provincial economy, making it ripe for the downwardly mobile MFA grad or late-career scholar who can afford to come, see, and buy property, or at least rent real estate at a disproportionately favorable rate. In fact, Claudia Rankine, the acclaimed poet, essayist, and mind behind The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), recently made Marseille her new home, declaring a felt kinship with the city’s migrant population.1

At Systema, TRII presented a poignant short film on Thelonius Monk tucked away in an easily missable upstairs room. The film, Abide With Me (2024), was written and directed by Harmony Holiday, whose brilliant oeuvre includes poetry and music reviews. It shows archival footage of Monk from the lesser-known period of his life before his rise to fame, voiced-over by Fred Moten, who reads in his deep, rhythmic, chant, a text written by Holiday. The film also includes brief shots of musicians such as Nina Simone and Sun Ra in moments backstage, where the person behind their public personas transcends identity. Having previously written equally touching essays on James Baldwin and Greg Tate, Holiday is adept at making space for the unknowns and invisibilities of an artist’s undersides and the vulnerable versions of self, impossible for the gaze alone to extract. The author’s poetic mind does not separate content from form, filling the film with inimitable lines such as “And I don't know how morally sound it is to save souls with that spell, luring them back into performing the act of being regular men and women—laborers, drifters, relatives” and “They just had access to other languages and no place to speak them.” 

The decision to present Abide By Me at Systema saved TRII from its concurrent, tactless exhibition Unworlding, curated by a founding member of TRII’s team, John Lucas, which took place as part of the city’s simultaneous art fair Art-O-Rama. Heavy handed in its treatment, the overly didactic exhibition repeatedly returned to artworks reiterating atrocities committed by colonial powers, leaving no room for dialogue outside of their sweeping positions. The exhibition featured artists including Mel Chin and Beverly Buchanan and, for its accompanying conference series in the days following, intellectual heavy hitters Ariella Azoulay and Saidiya Hartman. The intention was too obvious: to provoke a conversation by importing a discourse on race and colonialism produced by the US academic and international art-world elite into a city that lives its own, distinct version of these histories. Such an approach risks virtue-signaling or lecturing to the people—the laborers, drifters, relatives—about their material lives without inviting participation or accounting for the specificities of local conditions. Showing mostly work of already-institutionalized artists speaking a like-minded, one-way tongue of contemporary art world language, TRII is at risk of reproducing a power imbalance it ostensibly seeks to overcome by centering an understanding of racial conflict specific to a set of intellectuals and degreed art people based in the United States. The potential hypocrisy of this exhibition and conference, funded by prominent institutions including the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Terra Foundation, from Germany and the United States respectively, resulted in several artists repealing their participation at the last minute in an unofficial boycott.2 Named as a refusal, these artists explicated an understanding of the funders as proxies for colonial power, artwashing blood-soaked money, lacking any genuine local cultural roots, and therefore complicit in Marseille’s “gentrifying economy.”3

The language on TRII’s website preemptively aimed to soften the probable accusations, stating that “TRII Marseille builds a flexible and evolving network—one that supports dialogue as a form of resilience across borders, disciplines, and lived experiences.” The Institute cited an intention to include local Marseille communities in “public conversations that cultivate connection and shared inquiry.” This harmonious aspiration aligns with Systema’s genuine intention, stated as “assert[ing] the necessity of collective presence: to gather, to exist visibly, and to engage and sensitize audiences and broader publics to these practices and their conditions of operation.” While such mantras can feel generic to a situation that requires a deeper, more specific application of words, and at least a partial admittance of complicity, using internationally legible art-ish language can be a way of describing a project without attracting overt political scrutiny or jeopardizing institutional support. Last year, the regional government of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA), which also provides some of Systema’s funding, introduced a charter banning inclusive language in organizations receiving public money, resulting in a school in Marseille losing its funding after it refused to stop using gender-inclusive language in its communications.4 The incident offers one example of how being on the wrong side of political decisions can directly affect an already precarious art ecosystem.

Despite its identification with the margins, no “generic art”—no local street hustler, cafe cook, soap mason, or petty thief, who also happens to make art—was included in the Systema festival. In fact, aside from the festival’s organizers, very few of the participants were based in Marseille, or beyond two degrees of separation on Instagram, if that counts as an art network. In this sense, the festival could be anywhere—not to discount the vibe contributions of the Mediterranean breeze and Pétanque competition next door. While the lack of Marseillaise artists might make the festival feel far away and without local roots, a counter-perspective would be that Systema fosters encounters between the festival’s international network of art workers and local artists and art students, who might not otherwise have access to the network’s cultural capital. 

Nico Kleist and Richard Sides brought Berlin to Marseille with MIX 2026 (2026), a charming video montage of in-crowd art workers dancing their way through Berlin, on mall escalators, through the grocery store, against the sunset, to the tune of their own Walkmans. Viewers can’t hear what they’re listening to, but an upbeat soundtrack overlays the vignettes, reminding us of the freedom that comes with the precarity of art-worker lyfe, exempt from the doldrums of the proverbial nine-to-five. At night, Sides transformed into DJ Vodka, playing an infectious set for Systema’s opening-night afterparty, for all the art workers in their interchangeable roles as artist, curator, writer, critic, and educator, past, present, and future. Letting go to the rhythm of the night, the daily stresses of volatile funding structures and a fragile gig economy melted away. 

A replica of Michelangelo’s David statue stood with his backside facing the revelers in the courtyard, which also functioned as an incidental backdrop during the performances presented throughout the festival by the curatorial group JULIET, comprised of Maria Jooyoung and Laura Katzauer, also based in Berlin. JULIET participates in an ongoing collaboration with Marseille–based Giselle Books, run by festival co-founders Witz and Morey-Weale. In Berlin, JULIET relies on the architecture of an apartment balcony to structure the unfolding of choreography, prompting the hosted artists to negotiate between private and public spheres of performance. In the Systema courtyard, JULIET brought a blue curtain as the primary set piece, transforming the courtyard into an ad hoc stage. In The Misfortunes of Virtue, Olga Hohmann peeked through the curtain’s center split before interspersing a reading of her own text with a full legato voice in song, pure presence in its delivery. During the performance, double-bassist Fadwa Qamhia appeared from behind the curtain to begin an accompaniment. In Night Walking, Jae Pil Eun meditatively opened the curtains, revealing the ass of David as if part of a choreographed gag. On stage, Eun mimicked movements from Peking opera’s performances of femininity played by men, exploring the subtleties of hand gestures that have a specific emotion attached to each angling wrist or bending finger. These subtle and somewhat improvised performances, along with the rest of Systema’s programming, created gentle moments in between each act for conversation.

Another curatorial project Tseon Tseon, initiated by Systema coorganizer Choi, invited self-identifying working-class artist Cecilia Dougherty, whose films Eileen (2000) and Kevin and Cedar (2004) feature Eileen Myles and Kevin Killian respectively. These films, part of the Writers Series (1998–2018), subscribe to the same homemade, friends-circle approach as in MIX 2026, though their protagonists belong to an older generation of Dougherty’s peers. In each home-video-esque film, Dougherty finds a lo-fi form responsive to the style of each writer’s language. In Eileen, Myles moves through their East Village apartment with their dog Rosie, occasionally making eye contact with the camera following them. The unaffected portrait of Myles is woven into shots of mundane daily life—a plastic pour-over filter, the iconic Anthora disposable coffee cup, a week-old bedside tiger lily. The footage is overlaid with Myles reading from their novel Cool For You, during which they increasingly slip into a native Cambridge, Massachusetts accent, narrating without pause. In Kevin and Cedar, the late New Narrative writer Killian has just met Cedar Sigo in person for the first time. Shot in Dodie Bellamy’s San Francisco apartment, Killian reads Sigo’s O Fantasma, and then his own, Who, while Sigo mouths something unintelligible behind him. The portraits are intimate and ordinary. As with JULIET, they likewise negotiate a space between the private domain and public exposure. The domestic setting in both films lends itself to the informal and candid ways that communities form, where deep hanging out is how unofficial art histories come to be made and written.

Works experimenting with language continued with Théo Robine-Langlois’s exploration of poetry in fashion form, invited by the Paris-based project space Tonus. In poster-sized works on paper with titles like Zhandra Rhodes, Conceptual Chic, Autumn-Winter, 1977 (2026) and Christian Dior, 1948 (2026), letters took on a new dress. Black printed symbols were recombined into arrangements and shaped as clothing items. Exclamation points, commas, and characters such as X and J were isolated from their lexical designations, treated as primary artistic material, and transformed into graphic elements, stacked next to each other to form a pullover or a dress. The arrangements of printed letters and symbols, written over in Robine-Langlois’s all-caps handwriting, were exhibited in hallway vitrines, where announcements for a student recital might typically be displayed. If language is the foundation for how concepts are named and made intelligible, then attending to its most fundamental elements is what allows these works to formally intervene in the structures to which discourse often remains obedient.

Returning to Harmony Holiday’s line, “they just had access to other languages and no place to speak them,” I think about the increasing fragmentation of contemporary art language as a double-edged sword. In one sense, it might allow local publics to determine how to address issues specific to themselves; in another, arguments may become preoccupied with the definition of terms rather than prompting genuine discourse. If the common ground of Systema’s network is the self-identified contemporary art worker, this implies a shared value in how to be in space and conversation among a diaspora of art-educated peers who live and work in one place, might be based normally in another, and were born somewhere else. This is a chosen migration often made possible through a privileged passport—like the one this review’s writer holds—and/or familial wealth, yet it still requires cobbling together a living in a financially precarious field. Perhaps this is where a network like Systema’s becomes important, as a space in which the terms of conversation can remain open long enough for other forms of practice to emerge. 

1 Colin Grant, “Claudia Rankine: ‘I can’t live in the US: I like free speech,’” Observer, July 23, 2026, https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/claudia-rankine-i-cant-live-in-the-us-i-like-free-speech. 

2 Instagram post detailing the boycott of Unworlding, from @jannnou, @kmardouagi, and @nouriabehloul, August 19, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DcNn59KjJAC/?img_index=1. 

3 Instagram post detailing the boycott of Unworlding.

4 Sylvain Pignol and Nathalie Perrier, “La Région supprime sa subvention pour ‘écriture inclusive’ : l'école Kourtrajmé, à Marseille, veut comprendre,” La Provence, May 21, 2025, https://www.laprovence.com/article/politique/7860878680655914/la-region-supprime-sa-subvention-pour-ecriture-inclusive-lecole-kourtrajme-a-marseille-veut-comprendre. 

Cecilia Bien is a writer and scholar based in New York and Vienna.

All images: Documentation by Raphaël Massart - Courtesy of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026