Getting around today is not very advisable, yet what has been built in Arles stimulates the challenge. Traveling has become not only less easy, but also ethically very problematic. However, we can still get rid of some small satisfaction before the Dutch Frans Timmermans' horse cure arrives.
Sooner or later we will also have to come to terms with the fact that mass tourism and its prolific industry will no longer be able to return to the pre-pandemic forms.
Farhad Manjoo, one of the brightest columnists on the liberal wing of the New York Times, in a July 9 op-ed entitled “The planet cannot handle our travels" (Also in Spanish), listed the many reasons for the probable end of theovertourism. One can also disagree, but there is some foundation in what he says.
Back to iron
It's no longer the gently traveling in the clouds. A pleasure that we will have to leave to the astronauts Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson or to the serial traveler George Clooney.
Some studies show us that a tourist or visitor has an environmental impact 70 times higher than that of a resident. Holy shit, it's a space number.
Furthermore, if Europe wants to reduce emissions by 2030% by 55, it will not be able to do without taxing air flights, as the “Financial Times” compassionately suggests.
Who knows what they will do Easy Jet, Wizz Air e Ryanair. For now, the ineffable Michael O'Leary – head of the Irish carrier, which wanted standing room on its planes – has ordered 70 new Boeings. O'Leary is one of many candidates for the forthcoming "Nuremberg Trials" led by the post-Greta generation. The collaborators will also go to trial.
There's always the train, dammit. The Russians – I mean the Russians who can't care less about climate change – have built a colossal new railway line of 4300 kilometers from Tayshet to the Pacific (the “masterly” Baikal-Amur) which follows to the north (in an environment much more hostile) the route of the Trans-Siberian. Cost: 17 billion euros.
It will be used to bring passengers and goods from Asia to Europe with decisive savings compared to the maritime transport of containers via Suez (20 days against 45 and it will cost half). Here is the Russia we like.
France taking the chair
But it is France that is giving the momentum. Between 2020 and 2030, the French government intends to invest 75 billion euros (of which 35 in debt) in the railways. He also has the idea of banning flights for transfers that can be done in two and a half hours by railway. It could even go up to four hours (I say).
It will focus heavily on night trains. The "memorable" Paris-Perpignan (leaving from Paris Austerlitz at 22 pm), has recently been joined by the "Train de nuit" Paris-Nice which always seems to travel at maximum occupancy (SNCF says it sold 22 seats this summer tickets for sleeping car transfers). Perhaps the Paris-Venice line (operated by Trenitalia) will also be reintroduced and abolished in 20.
The French tell us that there is a large public willingness to travel by train even for long journeys, with overnight stays in a wagon-lit, if the fares become affordable. Now they are absurdly high (Paris-Perpignan, 187 euros one way) and moreover subsidized by the taxpayer.
When in January 2020 I accompanied my nephew Marco to the unfortunate Erasmus at the University of Paris-Nanterre, most of the kids who were with him had reached Paris by train and would have returned home, once the lockdown was decreed, by train. For example, Luis came from Munich and Johanna from Vienna. They used the Trainline app to find the best fares. For these German-speaking kids, the plane trip was not even calculated.
To Arles by train
With a little good will, Arles can be reached by train: it is an hour from Marseilles, 4 hours from Nice and 9 from Genoa. From Genoa you can find a ticket for less than 50 euros one way. From Turin (more or less the same hours) however it is much more expensive (135 euros one way), because there is a TGV train up to Chambery. There are two or three changes, but depending on the timetable, the wait for connections is reasonable.
From Genoa you can book a window seat and watch the colors change as you travel from one coast to the other. After Nice you can put on headphones theArlesienne by George Bizet which is an excellent prologue to the color of the town where we are headed. Arles has just 52 inhabitants like Gallarate or Anzio.
… even with music on headphones
On YouTube you can find the two famous ones Suites excellently performed by the Stockholm Symphony Orchestra. The most willing up Spotify can hear the four movements of this incidental music composed by Bizet for the drama by Alphonse Daudet.
Maybe on your return you can try to listen to some essays from Francesco Cilea's much more painful and demanding work. The Arlesiana: the 1897 premiere in Milan was interpreted by a very young Enrico Caruso.
On YouTube you will find a wide selection of the most famous aria “Federico's lament” in the interpretation of the great tenors. There's also one on Spotify compilation of about an hour and a half by the Rai Orchestra of Turin. If you go back to Turin this listening is in tone.
France that closes
We know that the French state does not tolerate any powers other than the public one in the field of art and culture. And here is the Center Pompidou, the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand and so on. Napoleon waged a war to bring the treasures of Egyptian civilization to France and exhibit them in the Louvre. Thanks to this expedition it was possible to decipher the hieroglyphs, even if the stele that allowed all this is in the hands of the English, Napoleon's sworn enemies.
Poor Bernard Arnault (poor so to speak, recently for a few weeks he ousted astronaut Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world) had his Odyssey of almost 15 years (comparison with Homer postulated by the ex-minister of culture Jack Lang) to build the headquarters of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. A spectacular building designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry with a jaw-dropping art collection and exhibition space.
Arnault's arch-rival, François Pinault encountered fewer obstacles in putting his hand, with a project by the Japanese architect Tadao Andō, on the building of the Paris Stock Exchange to make it the seat of its contemporary art collection (one of the most important in the world) and an exhibition center of primary importance.
The fact remains that the two luxury tycoons will have to return, after a conspicuous number of years, their works to the city of Paris and to the French state, proving that France and Paris are the first, as Honoré de Balzac said, "does not erect altars".
France opening up
Arles instead erects them. “Vive la gloire arlésienne, Vive Frank Gehry! Vive Maja Hoffmann!” exclaimed the communist mayor of Arles, Hervé Schiavetti, as he laid the foundation stone of the artistic complex wanted by Maja Hoffman, heir to the fortune of the family that founded the Swiss pharmaceutical multinational Roche.
In fact, Mrs Maja encountered only a few surmountable difficulties in Arles in conceiving, building and paying out of her own pocket for one of the most astonishing contemporary art complexes: the Parc des Ateliers, inaugurated on 28 June 2021. The complex will also be home to the Luma Foundation of the Swiss Hoffman-Roche family linked to Arles and the Camarque.
Already in 2014, the Foundation, having received the Hôtel Léautaud de Donines (a 40th century building) on loan for use from the municipality of Arles for 15 years, transformed it into a modern art gallery which, in combination with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, periodically exhibits Vincent's works. Finally the tribute that has been missing for more than a century!
It does not appear that neither the municipality of Arles, nor the Bouches-du-Rhin department, nor the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, nor the central government have placed particular conditions on Madame Maja such as those dictated to Arnault and Pinault in Paris.
It also seems that not even Frank Gehry had to give his detractors any middle fingers, as was the case at the inauguration of the Vuitton Foundation.
And how could they criticize this 11-hectare complex built on an abandoned railway yard (the train is back!) in the heart of Arles: the Parc des Ateliers can make Arles the Bilbao of post-pandemic Europe.
Him again: Frank Owen Gehry, 92, from Toronto
For an accurate description of the artistic complex of the Luma Foundation, I refer you to the report by Roslyn Sulcas published by the "New York Times", , here in Italian translation.
Also see Iwan Baan's photo shoot.
I dwell briefly on Gehry's intervention, which is the heart of the complex. It's hard to find a word that defines it. Dome? Lighthouse? Beer Barrel? Tower? Flagpole of a ship? Ice cream cone? American pie? Artichoke?
Gehry's forms are certainly not those of the classic figures of solid geometry. They are not even irregular, they are indefinable, they protrude, glean and flow from everywhere.
The building designed by Gehry is a 10-story tower covered in 11 panels of gleaming stainless steel, flexed and jagged so as to capture and reflect light from infinite angles.
The round platform that leads into the building is a clear reference to the Roman amphitheater in Arles.
The colors of Van Gogehry
Gehry, from his studio in Los Angeles, interviewed by telephone by the NYT reporter said that "the impression (dense word) of the building changes during the day". And here the infinite colors of the English Parliament immediately spring to mind, at different hours of the day, which Monet has impressed on you are tele. But Monet worked with a palette, Gehry works with steel.
You see the dark blues and reddish colors that are in van Gogh's paintings, and many others as the light and time change – said Gehry -. I've always thought that Greek bronze statues were an ingenious invention in arousing emotions with the material they are made of. Creating beauty with the hardness that still has the human imprint, this is what I try to achieve.
Inside, Gehry's structure is as museumlike as you can imagine with its spiral staircases, cubic white spaces for exhibitions, library, refreshment areas, panoramic views and so on.
Yes, creating the beautiful with the rigid, this is precisely the core of building. Gehry played it well. In Arles perhaps better than anywhere else.
… and a film can never be missing to finish
One last, somewhat aestheticizing thing about architects and architecture, beauty and betrayal, past and present, creation and stagnation. It is an architect's film about an architect pondering another architect in the most architectural city in the world.
I mean The belly of the architect written and directed by Peter Greeneway in 1987, with the superlative physicality and carnality of Brian Dennehy.
The film is practically impossible to find in Italian. If you live in or near Bologna, you can buy the VHS at the historic Balboni video library in via Saragozza, 233/A, near the Arco del Meloncello. If you are not from Bologna or nearby, Balboni can send you the VHS of Belly of the architect. Just write to info@balbonivideo.com or call the shop on 051 6141416. They also accept PayPal. Do you still have a VCR? I hope so.
You can also try lending from the library closest to your home. Film buffs are everywhere, even on Aconcagua.
Cover image: Left: an augmented reality installation of Vincent Van Gogh's “Starry Night over the Rhone”. Right: a nocturnal image of the tower designed by Frank Gehry for the art complex Parc des Ateliers of Arles.
