ABÎMES

ABÎMES is not looked at head-on: you walk into it. Veils of tulle hang at different heights, breathe at the slightest draught, and receive views taken beneath the surface of the sea. Each veil holds back only a part of them; the rest carries on behind, fainter, later.

What interests me is that gradual loss. The image arrives whole at the first plane and leaves the last one transformed. In between there are the folds of the cloth, the air, and the shadows of those who walk. The visitor is no longer at a distance: they become one of the thicknesses.

The projected views come from my own dives. I am not trying to frame a seascape; I am looking for states: the moving ceiling the surface makes when seen from below, the particles in suspension, the density that changes with depth, the nameless forms the water composes on its own.

I live in Brittany and I surf; my relation to the sea passes first through the body. It is that memory I am trying to render: not the likeness, but the instant you tip below the waterline and everything — light, gesture, sound — changes its rules.

Abîmes means depths. The word also carries the abyme, that figure in which an image repeats itself while shrinking — exactly what the successive veils manufacture. And it contains a verb: abîmer, to damage.

I do not want an ecological statement laid over the images like a commentary. If the piece carries a critical charge, it must lodge itself in sensation: a material that degrades on the image, a movement that goes out of true, a beauty that becomes uncomfortable.

For now the project holds between three things: an installation, a film unfolded in space, an environment of light. I have settled neither the scale, nor the duration, nor the way the audience moves while the images advance.

What these images show is a first state: a few veils, one projector and underwater views have begun to manufacture a place. What follows will depend on a real space and on the people I cross it with.