This summer, Marseille’s Centre de la Vieille Charité is transformed by *Sleeping Like the Sun*, a sweeping new installation from Marseille-based artist Adrien Vescovi. Occupying both the site’s iconic chapel and its surrounding arcades, the exhibition is the artist’s largest project to date and one that feels deeply connected to the city he has called home since 2018.
Working with hundreds of vintage sheets and expansive lengths of dyed cotton, Vescovi turns the 17th-century landmark into an environment of colour, movement, and shifting light. His practice is rooted in textile, dyeing, and slow processes of transformation, allowing materials to absorb traces of time, weather, and place. Here, the architecture itself becomes part of the work, with sunlight, wind, and the changing seasons continuously altering the installation throughout its run.
Nearly 600 vintage sheets stretch across the arcades while the chapel is filled with towering textile forms that immerse visitors in layered fields of colour. Developed through months of experimentation with pigments, natural earths, and dye baths, the palette responds directly to Marseille’s mineral landscape, bright light, and Mediterranean atmosphere.
Rather than presenting a static exhibition, *Sleeping Like the Sun* unfolds over time. Fabrics fade, shift, and gather new marks as the months pass, creating an experience that changes with every visit. The result is a contemplative encounter between contemporary art and one of Marseille’s most historic spaces, where memory, material, and environment are in constant conversation.
*Adrien Vescovi: Sleeping Like the Sun* runs from May 16, 2026 through January 10, 2027 at the Centre de la Vieille Charité in Marseille. Admission is free.