In the open-air show “Port Mior” Marc Boucherot, ‘Le charbonneur de l’art contemporain’ presents 30 new sculptures in Port Miou located in the Calanques National Park between Marseille and Cassis. The French artist is best known for his ‘social sculptures’ including his attack of a tourist train in the old city of Marseille and his performance “La Vie Rose” when protesting the shutdown of a social center for poor kids, he decided to paint the Rue d’Aix in flashy pink causing a massive traffic jam in the center of Marseille.
“Port Mior” is the first monumental intervention in a French National Park. The display was literally incrusted illegally on the top of a cliff facing the Mediterranean horizon. Port Miou is an exceptional natural site. The place is now all about silence, absolute white minerality and verticality. But until 1982, the site was exploited as an extraction quarry by Solvay, a multinational chemical company.
With ‘Port Mior’, Marc Boucherot takes up the ancient industrial artifacts (excavators, trucks, massive metallic tools, columns and structures of hoppers, gigantic rings) abandoned there 40 years ago by Solvay and gives them the aspect of very precious relics by covering them with gold. The metallic artefacts were left exactly in the place and the position in which they were found, thus giving the impression that those golden monuments fell from the sky as a divine punishment, crashed aliens or fallen gods. The glittering surfaces play beautifully with the robust materiality of the objects as well as with the strong sunlight and the whiteness of the rocks. The combination of the industrial sculptures with a unique natural landscape produces a kind of magical and pure potency that is literally everything.
