Horizontal

Marseille, March 2023

It all started with vertical signs: parking bans all over the street with a decree reproduced in small, barely decipherable characters, but the street would be closed for weeks on the even-numbered side. And then horizontal green and red lines appeared on the ground, accompanied by letters and numbers that were difficult for the layperson to understand, making these first signs vanish.
Until the day when small construction machines appeared, accompanied by humans tracing new prohibition signs on the ground while new, more precise decrees were hung on the small vertical barriers accompanying the works. If the paint on the ground is clearly visible for the local residents, it is far from being the case for drivers. The final, unwritten sign of prohibition is far more massive: the rubble extracted from the excavations necessary to replace the pipes is bagged and recycled as material obstacles to parking, as the vehicles leave their spaces. Horizontal AND vertical, perfectly adjusted to the space reserved for the construction site… unless, of course, scooters, scooters and electric bikes start to colonise the interstices.