Benjamin Wilkes

Intertwined observers : château d’if‘s fourth tower

Château d’If was built in C16 as a fortress and prison located a mile offshore from Marseilles. Contrived for its purposes of defence, surveillance, intimidation and confinement, its baffling spaces are designed to cause confusion. The Château was built in stages, including the construction of three towers, all facing towards Marseilles. A fourth tower was never built.

In contemporary Marseilles, surveillance and control have taken a new technical route. CCTV is the new surveillance. In 2010, a pilot scheme to deter crime was developed near the old port. In 2012, the CCTV network will be extended from 20 to 220 cameras. If this is deemed successful, 1,000 cameras will be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

The absence of the Chateau’s fourth tower presents an opportunity for a new structure … a CCTV surveillance terminal.

The Château is cultivating a new touristic dimension prompted by Alexander Dumas’ novel ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, part of which is set within a fictional Château d’If. Successful fiction has driven commercial reality to claim parts of the story as fact, reflected in adjustments to the architecture of the Château. The fictional life of the Château is elaborated further in the decoy strategy. Adjustments made to the structure are disguised as moves which explore the spaces of the novel, but actually deflect perception of the Château’s other use.

The Fourth Tower, a looped space, contains twenty rooms made for ‘watching’ Marseilles. Each room contains 49 projected ‘incidental’ images of Marseilles plus one real ‘horizon’ aperture. 60 members of staff rotate with one another in eight-hour shifts dictated by the ferry schedule.

Openings are created within the new tower, offering overviews of both Marseilles and the horizon, the orientation of which do not reveal the tower itself. It is only at the pinnacle of the tower, that all is revealed, where ‘watchers’ and ‘tourists’ both exist as ‘surveyors’ together.

Within the tower ‘watcher’ and ‘tourist’ are occasionally aware of each other’s presence on the intertwined spiral staircases, but do not interrupt one another.

The dire Orwellian warning that Big Brother is watching has morphed from grim totalitarian fantasy into a banal fact of life. The security cameras fastened on lampposts and the sides of buildings within Marseilles are put there with safety in mind, and we have learned to view them with more reassurance than alarm when we notice them at all. However, we are not familiar with the space at the other side of the camera. The intention of the project has been to explore this space and reveal a part of daily life that is radically overlooked.