31 DATES, 25 DIFFERENT WALKS in 2015
Inhabitants, artists, associations, firms and companies from the Northern districts of Marseille take you for walks !
Urban walks, a combination of concrete, tiles and hills landcapes,
to tell, and show you what is here, to let you discover Marseille from a Northern point of view.
- Seeking for traces – the History of Agriculture, Industry, or Migration(s),
- observing the many forms of housing, gazing at the landcapes far beyond the harbour, striding across the hills ,
HĂ´tel du Nordinvites you to watch the town as a Factory of History (and stories).
From the 22nd of March until the 20th of June 2015, HĂ´tel du Nord invites you to experience our walks (or boat trips),
enjoying our nearby attractions and hidden treasures,
sharing the passionate research that the Marseille Northern districts’ inhabitants have conducted for years...
Download our programme : Presentation of HĂ´tel du Nord urban walks in 2015: files//balades2015hdn.pdf
A postcard you can print and circulate among your friends, family...: files//cartebhdn2015.pdf
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TO PREPARE YOUR PALATE BEFORE STARTING WALKING WITH HÔTEL DU NORD IN 2014
The association HĂ–FN, (Dominique Poulain, coordinator)
The association A toutes les sauces, (Zohra Adda Attou, wild plants picker/cook)
AND Hitomi Takeda, visual and graphic artist
invite you, Sunday the 20th of April to join us for a rather intimate and experimental workshop:
The urban flora : we'll pick it, we'll cook it... she will draw it.
TO KNOW ALL ABOUT IT (registering, price location... and more):
click HERE: files//infosCCD.pdf
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TO KNOW ALL ABOUT THIS VERY SPECIAL YEAR 2013 AT HÔTEL DU NORD
WHILE MARSEILLES IS THE EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE ...
Those who build up and develop the cooperative and its projects,
(North districts inhabitants, artists, cutural organisations...)
may be:
- hosts,
-"walks' creators"
- people who make, invent, imagine, organize, produce ...
for the whole year 2013...,
partner with Marseille -Provence 2013, HÔTEL du NORD has set up a special program...
RENDEZ-VOUS ON THE WEBSITE OF HÔTEL DU NORD.
... AND SPECIFICALLY...
- to find a shelter et be WELCOME here and there in our North districts ...
- to criss-cross our North districts, sharing our HÔTEL du NORD STROLLS
... thus discovering our districts heritage, their history, their rifts and flaws, their victories, their fights,
their intense poetic charm, a secretive charm, an obvious charm, their wild plants, their flavours...
the best way to meet the inhabitants from here , there, and further away.......
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TO KNOW ALL ABOUT THE PROGRAM DURING THE EUROPEAN HERITAGE DAYS
(14th, 15th, and 16th of September 2012)
A PROGRAM DEVISED BY HÔTEL DU NORD, ITS PARTNERS AND FRIENDS, FROM THE 15TH AND 16TH NORTH DISTRICTS IN MARSEILLES : link
Some unique (!) moments during the EUROPEAN HERITAGE DAYS 2012, that Dominique Poulain (the Association and Residence HÖFN coordinator as well as a member of the Cooperative HÔTEL DU NORD) chose freely to describe, at random, just because she was THERE and felt like writing about and photographying places, people, situations she specially enjoyed...
Saturday the 15th of September 2012
It is not usual, on HÖFN website, no more than it is on the part dedicated to HÖTEL DU NORD... to write anything starting with I …, and to need then, probably, to sign the following text with my name: Dominique Poulain... since I shall be essentially subjective...
Anyhow, I feel the need to-day (stealing some hours from the THE "implacable" Time supposedly devoted to "inescapable" tasks) – to relate to you, through words and pictures, my arrival yesterday, around 3 p.m., at the Saint Antoine Railway Station (Marseilles 15th arrondissement). I was coming straight (or almost: at least as the... plane flies, then by the grace of... TGV Paris-Marseilles) from KeflavĂk, where stands the Icelandic international airport, about 50 kms from ReykjavĂk, the capital...
This coming back to my life in Marseilles was not easy. I lived for ten years in Iceland (beween 1862 and 1992). To day, my son Logi and my grand son Ăšlfur live (and ar born ) there ... They were those, first of all, I payed - too short- a visit to (from the 6th to the 14th of September), not mentioning my longlife Icelandic friends... It is also, each time I fly to Iceland, a "homecoming". I am born in France, from French parents but Iceland is the country I chose, once upon a time (some kind of a re-birth!)... 30 years ago!! It means that each time I stay there, as briefly as it can be, I ask myself the never ever elucidated questions: where do I live, where should I live, where could I live, where did I llive, where shall I live out my days?...
The plane which "snatched"(!) me away from the Icelandic soil, and took me at 1 a.m. (3 a.m. in France) to Paris, the 11 a.m. train which transported me to Marseilles made any time or space notions as blurred as muddled... My own biological clock, deprived of night and sleep hours, my mainly sitting, never horizontal, hardly standing or moving body for 12 hours, had left me drifting, faintly "robotic" when I arrived, at about 3 p. m. at the Saint Antoine railway station in the TER (Express Regional Train) Marseilles-Aix en Provence.
I have been living for 20 years in Verduron, near the Saint-Antoine district, (long ago a village, next to, not IN Marseilles, and somehow it still feels like it); there was, long ago, a reall though little railway station in Saint Antoine, as Marcel's bar shows: (Café de la Gare), i but it did not exist any longer in 1993 when I came to live in Verduron. We had to wait until 2008 to see it open again . To say the truth, , they call it, (on Wikipedia), rightly(!), since its new opening: « halte ferroviaire »(train stop). Fair and valid designation!! I could, plainly, describe it in this way: you get to it, from the very charming Marcel's bar, or rather Café de la Gare, in Saint Antoine, through a rough "parking" (sometimes deserted, sometimes over packed). On the right hand, a bleak and degraded hall as soon as it was built in 2008, deprived of any lighting at night, any train schedule, any ticket sale, any ticket-punching machine (when the machines went out of order... they stayed that way...), a stair case on the left side of the hall to get to THE platform. Up there, no shelter whatsoever against our sometimes raging "Mistral" (a well-known, and loathed North wind in Marseilles!), or burning sun. Nothing helps you understand that you are supposed to wait on the right side of the platform, in order to get to Aix en Provence, on the left side if you want to get to the center of Marseilles...
Let's not bite the hand that fed us!! We ALL are, in our Saint-Antoine, the Plan d'Aou, the Castellane, the Bricarde, Verduron closed districts or high-rise estates, DELIGHTED to get a direct and quick access to the Center of Marseilles, to the next districts or villages, to AIx. We still resent how much we have to pay for any fare, how tricky the "off- peak" hours (between 10 a.m. and noon, or 3 p.m. and 5 p.m) are: all trains seem to have vanished at those times!. We all are poor Cendirellas, obliged to get home long before midnight: no more train than pumpkin on the railway after 11 p.m.!!... BUT we may travel comfortably, easily, in a much quicker way from one distric to another within our huge Marseilles Northern area, and the BIG CITY, the HEART of IT, is not as inaccessible.as it was for my son, who lived here from the age of 7 til 17 years old...
Nevertheless, if my mind, still rather befuddled around 3.21 p.m. yesterday, tried nurturing some comforting thoughts, some aspiration for a dsired and desirable place, I must confess it was none other than my "home, sweet home", NOT the "Saint Antoine Train Stop"!!
AND YET!!
I HAD - almost- FORGOTTEN!!
No! Of course NOT! I had not forgotten Imke Plinta, a German graphic designer, generous, clever, bursting with energy, "sheltered" before my leaving, during my stay in Iceland, and ... until to-morrow morning at our writing residency an association HĂ–FN... I knew (almost!) all about her work here, now, which would be completed and culminate in the EUROPEAN HERITAGE DAYS , I knew it was set in between the 3 Saint Antoine, Saint Joseph-Le Castellas, Saint Louis -Les Aygalades railway stations (or should I say; train stops!)... but it seems I was not any longer in this THAT REALITY...
I did not need more than a few seconds, actually, going downstairs towards the hall, to feel like "back home", awaited and welcome in Marseilles, in my neighbourhood... It was magical.... "a touch from a magic wand", as they say!... a surprise I experienced in a rather egocentric manner(!): I(!) WAS WONDERFULLY GREETED as soon as I set foot at he bottom of the steps in an almost bridal living-room, coffee and cookies waiting for... ME, La cité des Arts de la Rue, Cosmos Kolek partners and friends, Imke and Ruedi Baur, their talented and generous workshop attendants, but FIRST OF ALL THE (once again and recently roughly settled here, as unwelcome as always) ROMA KIDS, beaming and joyful, and being part of, taking part in THE FEAST, that day...
Islande, vue d'avion (septembre 2011)
le Café de la Gare, tout à côté de la "halte ferroviaire" de Saint Antoine
Accueillie, avec Jean Cristofol, Ă la Gare de Saint Antoine, 15h 30, le 14 septembre 2012!
le hall de la gare, et ses "passagers" du jour!
arrivée de la "mobylette porte-voix"
spectateurs du moment...
Ruedi Baur, spectateur du moment...
autre moment de ce moment-lĂ ...
démarrage, bientôt, de la mobylette porte-voix
une dernière vision, sous le hall de la gare...
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TO KNOW ALL ABOUT THE PROGRAM DURING THE EUROPEAN HERITAGE DAYS
(16th, 17th, and 18th of September 2011)
A PROGRAM DEVISED BY HÔTEL DU NORD, ITS PARTNERS AND FRIENDS, FROM THE 15TH AND 16TH NORTH DISTRICTS IN MARSEILLES: link