John Bingham-Hall
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I am a researcher, writer, and cultural organiser based in Paris and Marseille. My current work focuses on the ways how climate adaptation strategies are transforming the cultures and politics of the urban public sphere, engaging critical humanities, creative research methods, and artistic works to address sonic, choreographic, and narrative dimensions of change. I draw on a training in music and urban studies, as well as a decade of work connecting arts and urbanism with Theatrum Mundi, to explore the complex dynamics that shape public life in cities through a series of cross-cutting threads including ecology, infrastructure, sound, movement, culture, and voice.

 

I work with universities, cultural organisations, and private practices to lead learning programmes, international knowledge exchange, and collaborative, cross-disciplinary research around these approaches. See my LinkedIn or Instagram for more, or email me to contact me about working together.


Website: CC-17

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Love letter to the Canal de Marseille

Following an era of drought, disease, and accompanying social unrest in the ‘Phocean city’, the Canal de Marseille was built in stages between 1838 and 1881, channeling water from the Durance river further north to irrigate and hydrate Marseille and its region, via 200 kilometres of tunnel and aqueduct. Transforming the rocky hinterland into fertile agricultural terrain, it tripled the city’s inhabitants and until the 1970s remained one of its few sources of drinking water. Known by its landmarks (the Pavillon de partage des eaux des Chutes-Lavie; the Palais Longchamp; or the Aqueduc de Roquefavour) the majority of the canal itself is hidden underground or (formally) inaccessible behind barriers, even though it still provides nearly two thirds of Marseille’s water. I followed its route as closely as possible for 10 kilometres from Saint-Antoine in the northern quarters of Marseille, reuniting with it wherever I could, and telling it my thoughts. This love letter is a reminder to myself to think of the canal and its long journey every time I drink a glass of water.


  • Boulevard du Vallon 13015

Ticket machine indecipherable, train late. This is a city of friction, trajectories through it are as jagged as the mountaintops around it. Twisting, snaking, evasive, like the narrow walled streets I have to follow in order to trace your route. You never give yourself up easily, not like the other canals I know. A glimpse of a concrete aqueduct between houses, then you are lost again, as the street curves away to follow your contour around the hill, hidden to me down the slope.

  • Boulevard Lombard, 13015

To see you suddenly – placid, smooth, cool in this broken landscape of glass and metal. In the park where we last met, you were decorated – a brief moment of show. Otherwise, your bridges try not to reveal you, or perhaps you try not to be revealed by them. You keep your distance. Skirting and looking down on the city you hydrate. From here, with you, it seems like an assault, that urbanity, when we’re together amongst quiet houses on a cool hill, as jardins ouvriers drip down your flank.

  • Jardins du Castellas, 13015

I know I won’t always remember to think of you when I switch on my tap or close my eyes under a cold shower in summer. But you’ll be on my mind the day the restrictions come. Then they’ll know your name. Will they love you for feeding them all these years, or hate you because it wasn’t enough?  Sometimes it seems as if you wish you were a mountain stream – innocent, without expectation. Is that why they made you a weir so you froth and babble white, keeping you content while you toil for us?

  • Canal de Marseille, 13014

As we meander together across the back of the city, there’s no more street. I join your path, illicitly, but your broken fences and open gates let me know I’m not the first one to come seek you out. In fact, I saw one of them. Taking your bank as if it was merely a shortcut rather than a precious, stolen ribbon. He pointedly ignored me – I don’t know if it was out of indifference or shame. The shame of two thieves passing each other in the night, or the indifference of a city street transposed onto this quasi rural hillside.

  • Chemin du Four de Buze, 13014

I haven’t seen you in a while. I’ve been getting to know the world around you. This world of closed bastides whose dogs warn me off, of retirement homes in the form of Provençal villages, but also of glimpses of realities that seem so at odds with the city. Shared gardens drinking from their proximity to you are like post-disaster utopias – they might be the last chance at survival for a lucky few once police once again guard the water, as they did before you were built.

  • Rue des Aygadiers, 13013

I have to leave you here. Despite your abundance, I can neither eat nor drink from you, until you have been transformed, segregated and squeezed through a thousand conduits, into the dense city below where I will find nourishment. But I’ll follow you again, of that I’m sure.

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