For this latest edition of "Marseille Résonance", Lebanese artist Kinda Hassan deciphers Marseille's "kaleidoscope" through a sound installation entitled Ex Nihilo (nihil fit), rien ne vient de rien (nothing comes from nothing ), questioning the different histories masked by the city's contemporary façade. Starting with the port of Marseille as a vehicle for the transfer of people, products, energy, histories and possibilities, she invites us to contemplate the processes of transformation of human life in the urban context of a city-port. The port becomes a lens through which to imagine and ruminate on the transformations wrought by political power, the gentle but certain shift towards capital, the production of desire, the domination of the machine and the circumstances of history's evolution, particularly the country's colonial and then post-colonial history.

These are transformations that are imprinted on the human body circulating in today's city, a city described and re-described in a unifying, sometimes reductive language. Kinda Hassan pierces the conventional, contemporary descriptions that promote Marseille as a cosmopolitan, Euro-Mediterranean city, a capital of culture. She goes in search of origins likely to tell a different story.

In her sound painting, Kinda Hassan presents the city and its port as subject and mirror, revealing original details often assigned today to the margins, to oblivion. These are details illustrating a daily life marked by the seaside: hours spent waiting for boats, bodies carrying tons of goods, products animating the city's markets, businesses born on the corpses of their antecedents. These are details that evoke ruptures, silences and endings. It's an intimate encounter with a story in which the city is brought back to its fundamental roots: Man and his experience of survival.