IT IS not hard to spot La Friche la Belle de Mai, the arts complex which is the home of the Irish in Marseilles this week. The facade of its huge gatehouse has been painted bright green, a conspicuous emerald in a quarter of sun bleached industrial buildings. At night, when the paintwork is invisible, visitors are guided in by green floodlights which wash the walls of La Friche's interior courtyard.
These decorations, and the green posters in cafes and on bus stops all over the city herald the arrival of Dublin's Project Arts Centre, for the climax of several months of exchange between the two cultural houses, which also marks one of the last events on the L'Imaginaire Irlandais calendar. Yesterday saw the opening of four separate site specific works by Irish artists Tina O'Connell, Rachel Joynt, Peter O'Kennedy and Conor Kelly, as well as a performance of Pan Pan theatre company's A Bronze Twist of Your Serpent Muscles and a concert by pianist and composer, Raymond Deane.
This week's programme will also include performances from Cois Ceim Dance Theatre, rock band the Idiots and a radio show with DJ Anne Marie Walsh. But despite the large Project presence at La Friche la Belle de Mai, overcrowding is not an issue. When the Marie de Marseilles (corporation) decided to open an arts centre in 1990, they decided not do it by half measures. Sprawling over 40,000 square meters, La Friche Ia Belle de Mai has converted the buildings of a former Seita state tobacco factory into something that feels like a cross between a well organised squat and an industrial estate for the arts.
On the site there are a handful of performance spaces ranging from immense, rough warehouses to intimate concert venues holding a couple of hundred people. The administrators of the centre use these spaces and an on site mansion converted into artist residences, to lure in foreign companies, such as Project. La Friche, however, also has two resident theatre production organisations. Naturally, alongside performances spaces are all the necessary rehearsal areas, including a plush penthouse dance studio overlooking the L'Etoile mountains that separate Marseille from the rest of France.
Theatrical performance, however, is only one part of what this huge project is about. In all 800 artists pass through the centre each year, taking advantage of studio, exhibition and rehearsal spaces. And to make sure nobody looses touch with its various activities, La Friche also publishes its own weekly newspaper, Taktik, and is home to not one but two radio stations. Naturally, La Friche also boasts a restaurant - decidedly not a canteen - a bar and a cyber cafe.
Does this make the Project contingent, currently in the process of moving out of their notoriously leaky Essex Street home, jealous at all? When last seen, Project artistic director, Fiach MacConghail looked far too busy explaining to a lunch table of French journalists that not all Irish artists were involved in making art about the political situation to get involved in any such odious comparisons.
