At Centquatre, artists and scientists united for the defense of the oceans

“We are the ocean, born from the ocean,” writes Japanese artist Maki Ohkojima under one of the frescoes presented in the Cent quatre hall. Carrying the voice of octopuses, whales, jellyfish and other marine creatures, it announces the color of the new exhibition at the Parisian art center : a marvelous wave of blue!

To highlight this precious ecosystem, seriously threatened by global warming, around forty artists were brought together by the Centquatre and the Tara Ocean Foundation.

Residences on the oceans aboard a schooner

This organization founded in 2003 by Agnès Troublé, better known under the name agnès b., and by her son Étienne Bourgois, took on the mission of studying the biodiversity of the seabed and raise public awareness of environmental issues. This, in particular, through art, the famous fashion designer being a great collector and patron. At the heart of this project, a boat: the schooner Taraa sort of scientific laboratory on board which artists have embarked, invited since 2005 to transcribe this extraordinary adventure in their own way. The works produced during the 13 expeditions organized over the last 20 years, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, are brought together at the Centquatre in a journey exploring the themes of landscapes, living things, pollution and the sensitive in the seabed.

Blue but also yellow, green, brown… Water reveals its thousand and one hues through the series by photographer Nicolas Floc’h “The Color of Water, The Seine” (2024). Its color chart composed of 144 pigment prints, like so many monochromes, serves as a health check of the Parisian river and the living organisms that populate it… Besides, do you know these mysterious underwater inhabitants well? The biologist Christian Sardet observed them closely by joining the Macronautes collective of multimedia artists. Together they pulled the plankton portrait. In photos and video, the “Plankton Chronicles” project allows us to evolve alongside these microscopic luminescent living beings. A splendid little galaxy.

For Laure Winants, her works are “fossils of the future”, witnesses to the ongoing massacre of marine biodiversity.

For his part, Antoine Bertin makes the phytoplankton speak. Based on scientific data, the artist created a unique sound object, which gives hear the activity of these plant microorganisms. At CentQuatre, the experience is through an installation, Metabolite Conversation (2022), composed of a speaker and a “puddle of glass” in which appear ocean images. As if we were behind the porthole of a submarine…

The union of art and science

This ambition to map the elusive thanks to the tools of science is shared by other artists. With “Regnum Marine”, the artist and doctor Lara Tabet thus created a directory of invisible marine species. Using water from the samples she has collected, she prints their image which appears like hieroglyphics. As for the artist-researcher Laure Winants, she makes the impact of pollution perceptible on the seabed by capturing the imprint of pollutants, aboard the Tara foundation’s sailboat, using a technique she calls “oceanic synesthesia”. For her, her works are “fossils of the future”, witnesses to the ongoing massacre of marine biodiversity.

A carnage more crudely exposed at Elsa Guillaume. Backpack-gills, fish-eye goggles, flippers… Funny macabre, his ceramic installation Fins et Slices (2016–2022) shows the fragmented flesh of marine species prey to intensive fishing. A work created thanks to his notes and drawings collected on board Tara. Because these artistic residencies in the open sea have often been an opportunity to hold logbookssome of which are presented at the very end of the exhibition.

“Artists help us understand that the ocean is alive and that it makes us alive,” explains José-Manuel Gonçalvès. The director of Centquatre intends to extend the art center’s commitment to ecological issues, two years later “Seeds, the exhibition!” »which already mixed art and science. The benefit of bringing artists and scientists together in the same environment? For Myriam Thomas, of the Tara foundation, the issue is simple: “these are two worlds which each observe reality and converge towards the same desire: an awareness of the vital role of the ocean. »