Stone

Marseille, June 2020.

At the base of the building, under a series of balconies, is a higher space covered with stones set in cement. It is unclear whether its vocation was aesthetic, undoubtedly missed, or security, as much as it was in defiance of the regular sight of young people sitting there to chat or simply to wait. In spite of its raw minerality, mosses had ended up occupying the surface, the only permanent inhabitants colonizing the welcoming pores.
In the middle of this grey-green white landscape, on this beautiful spring day, the eye is suddenly attracted by small black spots. As you get closer, you can see pairs of numbers lined up more clearly, a number discreetly drawn there in black felt pen. But no surname, first name, initials, no pictogram.
Usually, graffiti are signatures even if their reading is often only offered to the initiated. In the same way the inscriptions of love on the ground, on trees, on locks, scriptural acts to show eternity, pass through coded but shared signs – hearts, arrows, rings – around letters. In the digital age, is a number on a stone enough to mark one’s territory?