Arles 2025: Rebellious Images, Ancient Echoes, and the Music of AIR

SøEdited Team:
SøEditor-in-chief/Article: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe​​​​​

Each summer, as the Provençal sun casts its honey-colored light across the Rhône, Arles stirs awake not lazily, but with the quiet intensity of a city that has seen centuries and is ready for more. 

In 2025, that stir becomes something more electric. The Rencontres d’Arles, the world’s most subversive photography festival, returns with a charged new edition: Indocile Images. This is photography untethered raw, political, dreamlike, and fierce and it couldn’t find a more fitting stage than Arles.

Because Arles isn’t a city. It’s a palimpsest.
​

​You don’t just visit it, you wander through time. Each corner you turn reveals a new century layered on top of the old: Roman arches turned medieval walls, cloisters built with pillaged marble from forgotten temples, Renaissance façades clinging to ancient bones. Part of the city quite literally was rebuilt using the stones of its Roman past.

Walk through the Rue de la Calade and you’ll find Corinthian columns embedded in townhouses. Stroll into the Place du Forum, and under the shade of a café awning, realize you’re sitting where Julius Caesar may once have stood.

At the centre of all this history, the festival unspools like a bright thread through time. From July 7 to October 5, more than 160 artists will occupy 26 venues none of them neutral. A ruined cloister becomes a camera obscura. A chapel becomes a protest site. A salt warehouse from Arles’ industrial era becomes a temple of images. 

The city doesn't offer clean walls, it offers resonance. The images aren't merely hung they are haunted by the spaces they inhabit.

This year’s focus turns its lens toward Australia, where photographers both Indigenous and settler confront the land’s myths and violence. The works from On Country tremble with memory and defiance. Alongside them, global voices rise: Nan Goldin’s raw, intimate frames; Letizia Battaglia’s Sicilian ghosts; and the new generation, like Joel Quayson, whose video *How Do You Feel?* pulses with diasporic tension and beauty.

The opening week was its own kind of pilgrimage. The city filled with artists, thinkers, wanderers, and quiet obsessives who roam from exhibition to exhibition like they're chasing something just out of reach. At night, images are projected against church facades, city walls, and even the surface of the Rhône. You find yourself standing next to strangers, both of you lit by someone else's dream.

But Arles never lets you forget where you are. This is a city that once ruled as the capital of Roman Gaul. The Arles Amphitheatre, built in 90 AD, still watches over the city with its half-shadowed elegance. Once soaked in the violence of gladiatorial combat, now it holds concerts and celebrations. Nearby, the Roman Theatre, built for emperors and epics, opens again each summer, its broken stage waiting for voices to fill it.
​

Etienne Racine

And these ruins they don’t just sit in isolation. They’ve been folded into the living city. Saint-Trophime, a Romanesque cathedral just steps from the theatre, rises with solemn grace, its cloisters a whisper of medieval faith built from imperial stone. The Cryptoporticus, an underground Roman gallery, still stretches cold and perfect beneath the city like a secret spine.

In Arles, architecture isn’t just a backdrop, it’s dialogue.
And into this dialogue, music arrives strange and celestial.

On July 24, the French electronic duo AIR performed in the Théâtre Antique, and it felt as though they emerged from another dimension, as if their spacecraft made of synth chords, vapor, and memory has crash landed into the marble ruins of an empire. AIR’s sound was never made for chronology. It floats somewhere between 1970s analog nostalgia and the distant shimmer of interstellar futures.

To witness AIR perform beneath the open Provençal sky, amid the crumbling theatrical bones of the Roman world, is to experience a rare kind of history. Their songs, like Sexy Boy, Playground Love, and La Femme d’Argent, do not belong to one era, they shimmer across all of them, and in Arles, they find an improbable but perfect home.
​

Theatre Antique - AIR Concert

​It’s a collision of codes: the stern, ordered architecture of classical power designed for dominance, built in stone meeting the vaporous, infinite loops of electronic sound. The Roman Empire spoke in marble and conquest; AIR speaks in synth and seduction. Yet in this collision, something exquisite happens. The past doesn’t crumble, it vibrates. The amphitheater doesn't resist the music it amplifies it.

AIR Live in the Theatre Antique

​On that night, AIR was not just a band playing a concert. They felt like emissaries astronauts stepping out of a capsule of light, looking up at an empire in ruins and singing to it. Their music didn’t echo, it resonated. It filled the stone with vapor and voltage. It reminded us that the ruins of empire are the perfect stage for imagining something different, softer, stranger and free.

Come for the city that never stays in one time. That builds its present with the stones of its past. That lets images, music, and memory rise together in a chorus of contradiction and beauty.

Arles 2025 is not about nostalgia. It’s about the glorious disorientation of living inside a timeline that refuses to be linear.
​