The choice will not appease the climate of incomprehension which reigns in the Marseille cultural community regarding the new municipal team. In 2024, the programming and engineering of the Marseille Summer, a flagship event in the events policy of left-wing mayor Benoît Payan, will be carried out by the Lyon company B-PM. In this Olympic year, where it is hosting the Paris 2024 sailing and football events, Marseille has chosen to entrust its entire summer project to this artistic consulting agency co-led by Pierre-Marie Oullion, one of the founders of the Lyon festival. Nuits Sonores, and Baptiste Pinsard, its artistic director. This cooperative company – in partnership with the Taverne Gutenberg association, also based in Lyon – was appointed following a market with an adapted procedure (mapa) launched on September 30 and closed on November 6, 2023.
Created in 2020, the Marseille Summer, which includes cultural, sporting and leisure components, is experiencing growing success. In 2023, free shows by the National Ballet of Marseille, rapper Soolking and Enrico Macias on the floating stage moored in the Old Port, attracted tens of thousands of people.
In December 2023, in his office, Benoît Payan welcomed this success and outlined the prospect of a cultural season that he hoped would see strong growth but still be rooted in the local fabric. “The Marseille Summer costs a lot of money and will cost more and more because we want it to change dimension (…) And if I want to gain momentum, I will do it with local actors with collective ownership of this event”assured the mayor of Marseille, while noting the state of a “the world of culture is in great pain and is very attentive to what we do.”
“A specialized service provider”
If, in the market specifications, the municipality took care to specify that “the artistic proposal must include local artists”its choice of a service provider outside the city to design the 5e edition of l’Été marseillais contradicts the stated desire to support local stakeholders. “The ramp-up of programming in quality and quantity requires a specialized service provider (…) The B-PM-Taverne Gutenberg group was the only respondent to the call for tenders »we justify at the town hall, where we nevertheless assure that a larger number of candidates, particularly local, “would have been appreciated”.
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