“Initium Maris refers to the region of Finistère, that most westerly land, and to its Latin etymology, Finis Terrae, the end of the earth. This project takes us to ‘where the sea begins’, to explore the part of the coast that is submerged, on an expedition to see and think the invisible.” Nicolas Floc’h

For this first major exhibition by Passerelle at the Ateliers des Capucins, the contemporary art centre is presenting the photographic work of Nicolas Floc’h. He observes the great issues facing society, especially economic mechanisms and changes in the climate. For some ten years now, the artist has striven to represent the undersea world, particularly the various habitats and landscapes it comprises, through the photographic missions he has initiated. Through the representations he constructs, Nicolas Floc’h becomes a guide, a producer of images/works of art, while also creating documentary evidence of the state of that environment at a given moment, which can equally well be used by oceanographers, marine experts or educators. But first and foremost, the images produced open up a new chapter in the history of landscape art which has passed unnoticed by the great art movements. Whereas the paintings of the nineteenth-century Orientalists popularised the little-known but much dreamed-about landscapes of the Far East, the photographs in the Initium Maris project by Nicolas Floc’h reveal a very real world, although unknown to the vast majority of people. Indeed, the visions of the documentaries by the explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau or the animated film Finding Nemo from Pixar Studios are very incomplete, as they ignore a very large part of the undersea world, making it look far less remarkable than it really is.

Nicolas Floc’h’s photographs have great powers of suggestion, urging the spectator to project their own references onto the landscape formations, here a face appears, there the Sahara desert, or else a tropical forest! His black and white images recall astronomical views of strange planets, sharing with them several essential points: the human being has no place here and physical landmarks disappear. However, unlike those in outer space, the landscapes visited by Nicolas Floc’h sometimes reveal the impact of human activity.

Nicolas Floc’h (1970, France) regularly exhibits in France and abroad, especially at the Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain in Marseille, Dunkirk and Rennes. He will be resident at the Villa Albertine in the United States in 2022 on a project focussed on the Mississippi River.

Initium Maris [where the sea begins], 2015-2021

Initium Maris is a work in the ‘productive landscapes’ series. This photographic mission initiated by Nicolas Floc’h aims to represent undersea places at a time when climate change is causing major disruption to ecosystems. The expedition with his ‘OAO’ boat along the coasts and islands of Brittany was undertaken in dialogue with teams of scientists and local people.

The panoramic views of the undersea landscapes of Brittany, produced by the artist freediving or scuba diving at 70 locations, cover an area from Saint-Nazaire to Saint-Malo, and constitute a photographic stock of landscape typologies between 2015 and 2021. Taken between the surface and a depth of 50 metres, in natural light and wide-angled, these images allow us to get close to natural or anthropogenic landscapes and their transformations and show the extent of the visible as it appears to the viewer. The photographs presented in the exhibition come from the ‘Ouessant’ series produced in 2016, the preparation periods in 2017 and 2018, and then the expedition on board the ‘OAO’ in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Finally, for the series produced during the CheReef oceanographic campaign in 2021, Nicolas Floc’h strapped his camera case to the undersea robot ‘Ariane’ from the Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer (Ifremer). He therefore this time produced images lit by the headlights of the exploration craft, at a depth of between 700 and 1800m, piercing the deep black of the great depths.