Lukas Ley
Research project
Stirring Up Marseille: Audio-Ethnographic Explorations of the Watery Archeosphere
Project summary
Ports in the Gulf of Lions undergo regular de-siltation (dévasement) to maintain navigability. The government of the Aix-Marseille region and the City of Marseille are responsible for dredging around 30 coastal bases. After removal, dredged matter starts a new journey, the endpoint of which depends on the material and chemical characteristics of sediments. Grain size, color, and purity determine if particles are recycled or disposed of in nearby waste management facilities. When concentrations of toxic contaminants (lead, arsenic, PFAS, etc.) are below threshold values, sediments are released into the ocean at designated “re-immersion” sites in the Gulf of Fos or used for beach replenishment. But the treatment of sediments can become a contentious affair: in 2023, the swimmers’ organization Nageurs du Prado warned against plans of Marseille’s government to use dredged matter for recharging downtown beaches. They worried that sediments extracted from former industrial sites posed health risks and created unhygienic swimming conditions. NGOs, too, have blasted reports of sediment monitoring in and around the port of Marseille, which prove that seabed toxicity well exceeds European threshold values. Harmful pollutants can in fact stick to silt and sand grains and spread, which is why dredging operations have to be carefully planned and monitored – a costly affair.
The toxic elements on the surface of sediments can scatter when ports carry out dredging operations, but also when hobby boaters anchor in the bay, or when swimmers move close to the sea bottom. Together, these more or less innocuous acts have turned the Bay of Marseille into a contaminated “accumulation area” (Verney 2013), a toxic commons with consequences for marine species and humans (Faget 2011). And yet, few people know about the present state of the seabed and the displacements of sediments. While sediments appear in the spreadsheets and statistics of public agencies, as vectors of environmental risk or expense, they are also a moving archive of human-environment relations. The seabed bears the traces of past ignorance, present indulgence, and future-oriented restorative acts (see Daumalin et al. 2016). Because sedimentary accumulations mirror human activities and store chemicals, they represent morphing repositories of coastal life, a volatile “archeosphere” (Edgeworth 2018) that calls for a multimodal unearthing.
In this project, I want to find new interlocutory methods for conversing with the urban seabed, a “material witness” (Schuppli 2020) of Marseille’s past, present, and future. I call this sound-ethnography project Stirring up Marseille, as it seeks to instigate a new understanding of particulate matter in the Bay of Marseille by asking what it means, in practical terms, to “sound” the watery surfaces of the city. This Iméra residency will allow me to pursue three objectives: 1) ethnographically describe Marseille’s littoral as a sensorial “archeosphere;” 2) produce a sound collage to capture the “social life” of sediments, and 3) conceptualize a public walk involving local academics, artists, and institutions on the question of coastal design. As such, the project will contribute to developing an audio-ethnographic “seabed sensibility” – a key conceptual intervention of my second book (working title: The Sedimentary Forms of Urban Life.)
Biography
I’m an environmental anthropologist and head of the DFG research group S.AND at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. My work broadly focuses on urban infrastructures, materiality, and social inequality. My current research is interested in the place of sand and other types of sediment in (un)making urban futures.
