As wildfires rake the steep canyonsides of a digital landscape, I fly over the terrain searching for an elusive mountain lion I keep glimpsing in the distance. I’m playing The Alluvials, an ecologically minded open-world video game set in an alternative Los Angeles, at the launch of the Octobre Numérique festival in the city of Arles in Provence, southern France; a festival devoted to exploring virtual worlds. The nave of a 17th-century church has been converted into an exhibition space, filled with plasma screens and sofas bound in lime plastic banding to look texture mapped. Outside, less than 300 metres away, is the timeless flow of the river Rhône, unconcerned by this digital hoopla. Maybe not, though: according to the accompanying blurb for The Alluvials, “multiple stakes” link the Los Angeles Basin and the Camargue delta near Arles.
Octobre Numérique is all about the incursion of the digital into the real world, the merging of the modern and traditional, and it is very aware that such forces are putting a rapidly changing Arles under strain. The delta port – stomping ground of Roman emperor Constantine II, French writer Frédéric Mistral and, of course, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh – had become another pauperised Provençal outpost by the late 1990s. With its main industries dying out, only the first-century amphitheatre and other Roman remains gave it a brief tourism-related lift every summer.
But, in 2013, when the Luma Foundation announced the Luma Arles project, and its plans to build a large arts complex – complete with gleaming tower by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry – at Parc des Ateliers, a former railway depot on the centre’s eastern edge, the G-word – gentrification – quickly entered the lexicon here (it’s embourgeoisement in French). Backed by the Swiss billionaire Maja Hoffmann, the 67-year-old heir to the Roche pharmaceutical fortune, the foundation has relit a cultural fire in Arles, bringing the delights of the international modern art world to a debt-laden, struggling city.
But renewed interest in Arles has come at a cost. As Parisians buy into the Provençal dream, property prices have exploded, rising nearly 30% on average across the city in the last five years. At least Van Gogh, part of the first wave of outsiders to aestheticise Arles, had the good grace to be poor and miserable. The central Roquette district, a raffish shamble of narrow streets that once corralled Gypsies, fishers, and Italian and Spanish immigrants into a roughneck enclave, is now a giant, perfectly Instagrammable Airbnb aparthotel. Schools here are closing classes because there are no longer enough permanent residents sending their children there. With an unemployment rate of 8.8% – compared with the national average of about 7% – and 24% of people living below the poverty line, a social gulf is opening up in this city of 50,000. It is all too easily symbolised by Gehry’s stainless steel mirage of a tower.
The mayor of Arles, Patrick de Carolis, doesn’t see it that way. “You can love the tower or you can hate it, but that’s missing the point,” says the 69-year-old, who was elected in 2020 as an independent and inherited the project from his communist predecessor. “The point is that we’ve created a monument, like the Romans did when they built the arena here.” Tall, aquiline and patrician in his blue suit at the Octobre Numérique launch, he says the furore over Arles’s shifting demographics is a non-debate: “Gentrification is not a dirty word for me.” For him, it is a natural corollary of success; the rising tide that lifts all boats.
On a sharply illuminated Wednesday in mid-October, a time when the city is entering its hibernation period, Gehry’s tower – which some local people call “the crushed drinks can” – is resplendent. In the park below, a handful of tourists are sauntering around a giant pink pretzel sculpture, reminiscent of a flamingo’s neck. Outside the cafe, a twentysomething creative is waving wizard-like hands over his laptop and braying into his AirPods: “I’m really interested in that kind of interdisciplinary space.”
The seven-hectare (17 acre) Luma campus, with its clutch of exhibitions (it currently has displays on Diane Arbus, Carrie Mae Weems and Agnès Varda, among others) brings in 250,000-300,000 visitors a year. Because of Gehry’s involvement, there is some speculation that it aims to reproduce “the Bilbao effect” in Arles – meaning a keystone project, like the Spanish city’s Guggenheim Museum, leading the regeneration of a post-industrial city. Gwendal Simon is an assistant professor at Gustave Eiffel University who is working on a study of Arles. He says: “That’s a misunderstanding because in Bilbao the museum was just a small media element of a much bigger project of urban regeneration that cleaned up the soil and the river. It’s led to that wave of asking ‘stararchitects’ to design museums that were formally innovative and so helped publicise those places. But that doesn’t necessarily help them obtain the larger surrounding project.”
And this is where Arles finds itself. Since the closure in 1984 of the SNCF train yards that now house the Luma Foundation, and huge floods in 2003 that swept away the city’s remaining papermaking, metallurgy and rice industries, its tax base has been too feeble to permit such an overhaul. Hoffmann’s “private project in the general interest”, as Luma’s director Mustapha Bouhayati puts it, is in these circumstances a handsome gift – one amounting to €150m (£130m) by the most conservative estimate (there are no official figures). The foundation is troubled by the effects on the property market, which it appears to have accelerated but not instigated. But it is not in a position to intervene, says Bouhayati: “Even if we wanted to, it’s not in our capacity. We don’t have any leverage.”
Hoffmann may be a globetrotting billionaire art world rainmaker, but she has bona fide connections to Arles: she spent part of her childhood in the nearby village of Le Sambuc, close to where her father, Luc – an ornithologist who co-founded the World Wildlife Fund, now the WWF – set up the Tour du Valat nature research institute. Bullish as Hoffmann comes across, she is also sincere about wanting to help her childhood city. The park and other investments (she also owns three hotels in the centre) provide about 230 permanent jobs and will hopefully rebalance its summer-centric seasonality. Speaking to people in the streets, the general consensus – with some common reservations – is that Luma is a good thing for Arles.
But how many of the residents of Arles actually enjoy what Luma has to offer? Adjacent to Luma, across the railway tracks, is the deprived neighbourhood of Griffeuille, a barren housing estate with a complex of medium-density housing and a pair of towerblocks. It doesn’t take long to encounter France’s social rift here. Mohammed, a 50-year-old born in Algeria, is scattering bread for a flock of pigeons outside his pizza truck. He is indifferent to Luma’s presence up the hill: “They’ve done nothing for me. I give to the birds, that’s how I get my pleasure.” Around the corner on a bench are three residents keen to bemoan the state of the country. “It’s [president Emmanuel] Macron’s fault. He prefers to bring in foreigners, rather than let us work,” says one, who has a paratrooper’s tattoo. He agrees with Mohammed about Luma: “There’s nothing for us up there.”
Luma and Griffeuille seem to belong to two separate universes. One –with its salt crystal-cladded walls, “isometric slides” and laboratories making thermal insulation out of local rice straw – where reality is a plaything to be atomised, conceptualised and reconfigured. The other – with weeds choking the main courtyards and the mistral scouring the whitewash off the towers – where reality is succumbing to entropy.
More than anger, it’s widespread apathy that Hoffmann, and Arles’s other cultural actors, must confront in these neighbourhoods. Bouyati says that he encounters a kind of “auto-exclusion” when trying to convince people in Griffeuille, and other impoverished districts of Arles, that art has a place in their lives. “In every European society, a lot of people don’t feel touched by much – there is a level of marginality or passivity. It applies to voting also – it falls under the same line of feeling out of touch with the world somehow.” This sentiment is understandable in the face of events such as the shooting of a teenager in Griffeuille last year, 15-year-old Marwane Maama, who was an innocent victim of drug-related violence. Art seems irrelevant.
But Luma is trying to make its case for its presence in the city and, by implication, art’s wider social utility. It has organised visits for Griffeuille residents through the neighbourhood’s social centre, and helped organise a community kitchen project – though it has now stepped back from direct investment. About 11,000 local students have attended programmes and workshops on Luma’s campus – some of whom have gone on to internships. Octobre Numérique is also conscious of the need to relate its digital explorations to the real-world stakes in Arles: the day after the opening of the festival, there were two roundtable discussions examining the virtual realm’s applicability to urban design and heritage. One case study involved using the video game Fortnite to consult young people in Barriol, another poor Arles suburb, on how to redesign the neighbourhood.
Should the development of Arles rest on art and culture alone? Mayor de Carolis thinks they are vital. He says that, rather than being global culture interlopers, the likes of Luma and Octobre Numérique contribute to the city’s long-held, unparalleled status as a manufacturer of the visual image. He points to a legacy that runs from Roman statues and sculptures, to Catholic icons in churches, and the photography exhibited at the annual Rencontres d’Arles festival. This unique “DNA or imprint” means, in his eyes, that Arles was the natural site for a big hitter like Luma: “It’s like the Odéon theatre in Paris – boulevards plays don’t work there.”
De Carolis’s critics say that the former journalist, who used to be president of the national state broadcaster, France Télévisions, is taking the communications approach to civic development, without meaningfully combating deeper problems. Baptiste Hédouin, a geography student at Aix-Marseille University who was attending the Octobre Numériques launch, says: “He wants to make a postcard city out of Arles, where the majority of investment goes to repairing the streets and certain historic attractions.” “In terms of jobs and economic development, he’s not interested if it doesn’t concern his ‘city of the image’, which I find rather backward conceptually.”
To some extent, de Carolis’s hands are tied by the city’s financial constraints – its debts run to more than €100m and €40m has been reserved for the long-overdue regeneration of Griffeuille and other working-class neighbourhoods. The town hall is also grappling with a Europe-wide conundrum: how to tame the Airbnb beast. It has raised the tax on second homes to 60%, though given that 81% of Airbnb rentals in Arles are primary residences, it may have limited effect. It’s also examining the countermeasures other European cities are taking.
Given the speed of Arles’s resurgence, the municipality is not in an easy position. With the Luma Foundation, it is asking local people to believe in its cultural vision. In late afternoon, the sweeping quaysides are bathed in amber light, as twentysomething hipsters picnic while fishers zip down the Rhone in speedboats. But it could be too early, and too naive, to ask everyone to see the city through an artist’s eyes just yet. “I do have to say that maybe things are going a bit too fast here,” says Bouhayati. “Because, I mean, cities need time to process, to metabolise things.”
Octobre Numérique runs until 10 November
