Banksy Puts A Fine New Lighthouse In Marseilles

When Britain’s ebullient graffitist/prankster/political gadfly Banksy drops a move, the best art sleuths throughout the kingdom drop whatever they are doing and rush to verify the what-where-when-who-how. As happened on Thursday, May 29, rather late in the news cycle, the hunt is ordinarily triggered by the reclusive artist himself and/or his assigns in the form of “Pest Control,” his personal verification/art agency. In the case of the witty, tiny, “extended shadow” of the lighthouse mural in Marseilles, pictured above, the post of a shot of the stark black, rather foreshortened lighthouse, fully in the Banksy style, went up on Banksy’s own Instagram account (of all places). That threw the kennel gates open for the predictable flood of the finest coursing hounds in the British press last night.

By lunchtime Friday in London, some five hours ago at this writing, no less a pack of art sleuths than the BBC had confirmed the chosen — now quite elite — streetscape as the Rue Félix Fregier, just south of the city’s legendary port. As with everything Banksy, siting and context are chief among the avenues of investigation into the man’s intent and into his his hilariously ruthless nocturnal execution of his art. And so we have now, per Banksy’s choice, the port of Marseilles: Forever a magnet for European organized crime, in the late 20th century it grew to become the infamous sluice for much of Europe’s heroin trafficking (cf. The French Connection).

That revenue stream is still in spirited play in Marseilles and in other, smaller, less-well-policed ports of call on the southern tier of the Continent, but over the last decade a new, politically fraught focus of all coast guard and/or national police forces in the northern Mediterannean — be that the forces of Spain, Italy, Malta, France, or Greece — has shifted to the combat of trafficking in people. Significantly, both for this ongoing paradigm shift as well as for Banksy’s choice of Marseilles as a site for the 2025 placing of the lighthouse grafitto, the charity/humanitarian group SOS Mediterannee operates its massive and very capable rescue ship, Ocean Viking, out of Marseilles.

Further toward decoding that Banksy has slipped into Marseilles to start production in Summer 2025, this week the Ocean Viking has been particularly busy with the rescue of 116 refugees whose wooden boat had departed Libya but which had given up the ghost and began to capsize in the central Mediterranean between May 24-26. The situation was dire. The rescue had to be executed in stages, mostly at night, hampered by bad weather and lack of coordination among the responsible coast guard forces, Italian and Libyan, according to the documentation of SOS Mediterannee in Marseilles. The first two attempts by civilian vessels managed to get some of the refugees off. Called in late, the Ocean Viking got the remaining majority, some 52 people, including women and children. Three refugees drowned.

Occasionally, the point of a Banksy stencil is the siting, sometimes amplified by a title. But in the case of this most recent Marseilles graffitto, as pictured top and below, there’s an actual stencilled legend, Jenny Holzer-style, across the lighthouse, reading: “I WANT TO BE WHAT YOU SAW IN ME.”

As seen in the two shots above, the lighthouse, for centuries a welcoming metaphor, is painted here as the shadow of a bollard, which is to say, as an extension of a barrier. No clearer a portrayal of Europe’s bifurcated politics toward the endless boatloads of migrants from Africa can be had than that. Put bluntly, the shadow of a welcome — in the form the lighthouse — awaits only as a shadow extension of the defensive perimeter, the bollard. In this reading, then, the stenciled words cut at us from the perspective of the lighthouse shadow. The second-person pronoun “YOU” refers to the migrants. The stenciled text is the message from the lighthouse-mirage to the people that are, week in, week out, literally dying to reach it. What they SAW — emphasis on the past tense — was a lighthouse. What they got was a bollard.

In fairness, and since the man has danced so adroitly atop so many political fences, both real and imagined, it’s difficult to say precisely what Banksy has buzzing in the behive of his mind, but nothing — repeat, nothing — the man writes can be taken at face value. More safely, with this artist, we can attempt to nail down what he’s trying to say by assuming that a few thousand metric tons of irony is being poured over us within whatever it is that he actually, physically states. What migrants mistake for a lighthouse offering safe haven may just be the mirage caused by the bollard keeping them out, period. The text can also be, in Banksy’s hands, a wholly cynical pronouncement uttered by Europe.

Thus, this week in Europe, on the cusp of the summer solstice and with it, the “migrant season” kickoff for the police forces on the Med, neither those forces nor the lighthouses of Europe have exactly been welcoming beacons, as SOS Mediterannee has richly documented. The rest of the tumultous, deadly migrant season lies before us. Bottom line, according to the stencilled text: Europe is not capable of “seeing” the waves of migration plowing across the Med as anything but an existential threat.

Unclear, also, is whether this lone graffito, ominous as it is, portends what we might call a Banksy “residency,” as he has performed in Palestine, for instance, as he stenciled various fraught locations as well as the vast Israeli wall over a period of weeks. It would make logistical sense if he hung around the northern Mediterranean for a bit — if he’s taught us anything, it’s that he knows how to get the bang out of his conceptual buck. There, in Palestine, portentously, political irony was in rich supply, as it is out on the high Mediterranean today.