Notes from Marseille: The 101st Trans Europe Halles Conference

Last April, thanks to the VAHA programme, I had the chance to attend Trans Europe Halles' (TEH) annual conference — a network of independent cultural spaces I've been following for years — together with my dear friend Jori (Jorela Karriqi). TEH is one of Europe's oldest cultural networks. It was founded in 1983 in Brussels and today brings together over 180 independent arts and culture centres across more than 40 countries. This year's conference was especially significant to me because it was held at La Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille. La Friche opened in 1992 in a former tobacco factory and is one of TEH's most active and long-standing member spaces.

The conference is the network's largest annual gathering. It's not only for members — it's also one of the main ways for prospective members and other participants to encounter the network. It runs over four days as a dense programme of parallel site visits, talks, project and working group meetings, and other member-focused events. This year's main focus was climate and green spaces, and the programme included community gardens and open areas both inside La Friche and around the neighbourhood. You have to make choices at a conference of this size, and I couldn't see most of them. I started the first day with a tour of La Friche, walking through different parts of the site and hearing stories from the people who use the space. It's much larger than any cultural space I've been to before — both in physical scale and in the number of people working there.

Independent social and cultural spaces in Türkiye are something I care deeply about, both personally and through the organisation I represent. What I wanted from the conference was to learn about tools, resources, and connections that could help socio-cultural places in Turkiye stay alive, grow stronger, and develop through new collaborations. On that front, I was very glad I attended. I met warm new cultural actors, and I think we opened the door to several possible long-term collaborations.
In many ways the programme was similar to other conferences I've attended, but the emphasis here was more on interaction than on information transfer. I had the chance to visit the Radio Grenouille office at La Friche — an independent radio station broadcasting from the venue at 88.8 FM — which is how I learned about their long-standing partnership with Açık Radyo, one of Türkiye's most important independent radio stations. 

I also visited Le Dernier Cri, an artist-run screenprinting studio at La Friche, where I met the artist, Pakito Bolino, and went through the prints on display. It's always nice to see independent artist publications and the places where they're actually printed. Pakito had come to İzmir a while back through an exchange programme with the Institut Français, and I picked up a publication that included Turkish cover as well.

TEH also has different working groups and regional hubs, including a Mediterranean Hub. I joined one of their internal meetings, a good format for hub members to reconnect, and listened to presentations from cultural spaces in the region.

There was also a significant on-site exhibition, SUSTAIN-ABLE? from the Alter-Places project, in which TEH is one of the partners. Alter-Places is the result of several years of collaboration developed through European and international seminars; brings together five alternative cultural places from Croatia, Sweden, France, Ukraine, and Germany, along with TEH and the DIY Space Project (Canada) as think tanks. I spent time in the exhibition and collected quite a lot of material. It gave me a useful frame, and a good set of concrete examples of what cultural spaces can do.

I took part in many more sessions and conversations than I can fit into this text. What I wanted to share here is a selection of what stayed with me.

We stayed in Marseille for five days, almost all of them filled with the conference programme. On our last day, thanks to Jori (as she is an architect) we made time to visit Unité d'Habitation, Le Corbusier's iconic modernist housing block, built between 1947 and 1952. It's definitely worth seeing. Marseille is the kind of place worth coming back to, again and again. This was my second time, and definitely not the last.

With our thanks to the VAHA programme for this opportunity.