This book shows through a series of photographs and drawings the process of development and manufacture as well as the challenges of the Seconde Nature public art work located opposite the docks of Marseille. Designed by artist Miguel Chevalier and architect-designer Charles Bové, this installation combines the real and the virtual.

Echoing the book, Gilles Coudert’s film included in the DVD, explores the design and actual production of Second Nature, a hybrid piece of public art mixing virtual and real worlds. Artist Miguel Chevalier and architect-designer Charles Bové tell us how they elaborated it together and explore its issues.

Second Nature is an artwork commissioned by Euroméditerranée as a prefiguration of Marseille-Provence 2013, European Capital of Culture.

“You arrive, dazzled by the bluish light of sun and sea on Arvieux Square with its old and now renovated Saint-Simonian warehouses, and you are struck by a huge, slanted sculpture that is wound around itself, shining brightly with its florescent orange. By itself alone, such a sloping spiral, 18 meters high with a 100-ton pedestal as its foundation, cuts a figure of the Mediterranean – the vividly colored Mediterranean of its boats, that of its shell-like forms, which inspired its creation, and that of the history of Massalia, the original Greek Marseilles, now 2,600 years’ old. A landmark, and henceforth a symbol of the city, it evokes one of the first forms of both humanity and mare nostrum: the spiral of time. And day turns to night. Everything is metamorphosed in the poetic and unreal atmosphere of a virtual garden inspired by Mediterranean flora, which is projected onto the warehouses 28 meters high.”

Extract of the text “Virtual Mediterraneans or the intoxications of time” by Christine Buci-Glucksmann