JULIA BORDERIE & ELOÏSE LE GALLO

France, 1995

Residency calm sea

JUNE 2020
Ouessant

There is this swell in the harbor.
The current and the wind. Rising, falling.
The wind on my face. It rises, it falls.
Slowly the field widens, we gradually enter the moving, deserted mass.
The water dunes ripple.
Fractals: small folds animate the surface of the ripples, stripe and wrinkle the great parallel waves.
Rising, falling.
A white seagull skims the water, seen in double, absorbing time like a black hole.
Rising, falling. Eyes close, blink, open: how much time has passed?
Always the horizon. We move forward into emptiness. I am full of emptiness, of wind.
Rising, falling.
The liquid surface of time bends as the hull moves through. Disoriented drowsiness.
The vision blurs.
A cuttlebone floats by, catching my gaze, a white dot drifting into the green-blue.
Rising, falling.
My stomach is my only anchor, the central point of a new frame of reference. I am my stomach.
An internal oscilloscope, it registers every altitude variation.

I am a single point in infinite space-time, soft and salty,
Nothing below. Nothing above. Just a stomach rising and falling.

Second night: it’s softer, calmer. The lying body is suspended, levitating, cradled by the fluid, perpetual motion.
Stopping no longer exists.
The oscillation imprints itself in the ear.

The next day, everything sways on land.
A faint whirlpool stirs reality: a kinesthetic mirage.
And what if everything I had always considered fixed was just an illusion?
The rocks around me take on a strange presence. Hallucinated.

I need to engage physically with the fluid itself, dive, feel a fresh slap.
At last, no barrier between the body and the undulation: floating on its surface in balanced gravity.

INTERVIEW WITH JULIA BORDERIE AND ELOISE LE GALLO

Collected by Nadia Fartas
October 2021


Nadia Fartas: How did you meet? When and how did your artistic duo take shape?

Julia Borderie and Éloïse Le Gallo: We met at the Ateliers de Sèvres during our preparatory year. We started working together in 2016 after completing our respective studies (Éloïse at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and Julia at the École d’Arts Paris-Cergy and later at UQAM in Montreal). The duo came naturally to us because our ways of working resonated with each other: we both developed collaborative approaches in our projects to create specific forms connected to encounters and territories.

The duo became a way for us to experience otherness, which is central to our work. Our first residency on Réunion Island allowed us to develop a methodology and lines of research that remain at the core of our concerns. Our research focuses on the interactions between water, landscapes, and the beings inhabiting them across different territories (Réunion Island, Agafay Desert in Morocco, Ardèche, the Paris region, the Seine, etc.). These are long-term projects with multiple stages, including research residencies, exhibitions, and events.

Through a poetic documentary process guided by encounters, the forms we create mainly emerge through video and sculpture, which connect and respond to each other. These mediums allow us to weave links between perspectives and practices.


NF: What did your residency on the OAO (Observatoire Artistique de l’Océan) boat with Nicolas Floc’h involve?


JB & ELG: The residency lasted a week. After sailing from Brest to Ouessant on his boat, we stayed moored near the Ouessant coast, first in the Lampaul Bay and then at the port of Stiff. The boat imposed a rhythm and conditions directly tied to the marine environment and weather, which we had to adapt to.

The experience of displacement, constant movement, and disorientation induced by the boat was crucial for us, especially since this residency initiated research on the notion of maritime markers. It was also physically demanding due to seasickness, which challenged the body’s balance with the oscillations. We slept in a cabin, with Nicolas nearby. The proximity imposed by the boat’s space, as well as the constant movement and noise on board, became integral to the experience: a daily rhythm defined by tides, trips to shore in a dinghy, and the sensation of becoming one with the landscape, our skin slightly sticky with salt air.

This close proximity to Nicolas allowed us to share our experiences and build trust. His generosity and hospitality were a significant contribution. He shared his workspace and life, which also meant sharing his artistic and personal activities. We assisted him with his underwater filming when needed.

We also explored the area around the boat, filming underwater and diving with him in parts of the island he knows well. We created a series of analog photographs and video footage on the boat and on land. This experience sparked an entire imaginary world for a project we were initiating.
NF: To what extent did the unexpected play a role in this residency?


JB & ELG: Boats and the marine environment are inherently sources of the unexpected. By nature, the oceanic space disorients because we are not biologically adapted to it. The boat destabilizes balance and, as a result, places the body in a state of physical disorientation. We sought this unpredictability to condition ourselves to listen and pay attention to the environment where we are working for our current project.


NF: In your video Albédo, access to natural elements seems obstructed. An object—a circular surface, both opaque and reflective, resembling a mirror or glass lens—intervenes between the camera and the filmed space. It hides the landscape while revealing it in an unexpected way. Additionally, while we hear the sound of air and wind interacting with this object, the other sounds of the natural environment are absent, replaced by a musical score. How did your journey between islands inspire these artistic choices, especially in addressing sight and hearing?


JB & ELG: Traveling between islands and across the oceanic space led us to explore liminal spaces like the water’s surface, the horizon, and coastlines. We investigate these zones using a reflective metal disc, which we activate to invert spaces and play with thresholds of perception. This continuous inversion disorients our references and expectations.

Albédo refers to the reflective power of a surface. The metal disc has been with us since our project on Réunion Island. Initially designed as a tool for optical inversion, we first used it to film the Indian Ocean. We now carry this object to reactivate it in other territories. By exploring its optical effects, this tool allows us to connect territories, waters, and shores; the video blends footage from the two islands, among other things.

This tool enables us to explore reflections, hallucinations, and mirages reminiscent of how water affects human vision. The immersive quality of the sound, oscillating throughout, seemed essential to conveying the isolation and relentless movement we experienced on the boat.


NF: How did the “Mer calme” residency contribute to your artistic production? Was it a way to extend ongoing research or to develop new ones?


JB & ELG: This residency and the resulting video Albédo led us to envision the next stage of the project: creating a series of optical glass objects made from diatoms. These objects will function as camera obscuras and later as optical prostheses for the camera, allowing us to film the marine landscape using materials derived from its composition.

We also want to delve deeper into sound research, focusing on the thresholds of the audible in connection with the images, especially through field recordings. We aim to link the sculptural act of creating these glass objects from microalgae with the images they produce and hope to collaborate with a bioacoustician.


NF: Broadly speaking, what interests you in art?

JB & ELG: We are interested in creating visual forms—whether drawn, sculptural, or video—emerging from encounters, situations, and territories. Each artistic project becomes a pretext for exchange and exploration of new fields.

When starting a project, we do not know what visual forms will emerge, and that’s what excites us. We position ourselves as poetic investigators: we don’t know what we’re looking for, but we know that the encounters will guide us toward unexpected paths and provide clues for a story to build together.


The resulting works become sensitive witnesses to these human encounters. We are currently exploring how artworks can be recycled or become matrices, tools for mediation, or interaction.
Collected in writing (email exchange).

Nicolas Floc’h hosted us in residence on his sailboat OAO to initiate REM, a collective exploratory research project in Brittany between 2020 and 2022 on the notion of Maritime Markers (Repères En Mer). It brings together researchers from various fields of art and science—oceanography, biochemistry, geography, sociology of science, geophysics, art criticism, and engineering.

By combining unique perspectives, the goal is to create a kaleidoscopic density around a shared subject: the reading of maritime space at different scales, both above and below the sea surface, and at the land/sea interface.

How does humanity attempt to apprehend the mysterious maritime space?
How do we organize this expanse of seemingly boundless water? How do we navigate it?
What marker systems are used at sea, both globally and intimately, psychogeographically?
How is the concept of a socio-ecosystem expressed?
How does the shifting land/sea boundary caused by climate change lead to a loss of markers?

This field of study will lead to the creation of a film, a multidisciplinary publication, and a series of glass sculptures made from diatoms (microalgae), which will serve partly as tools for filming the territory.

Diatoms form glass shells by synthesizing silicon and atmospheric CO2. They play a fundamental role as the first effective link in carbon transfer or sequestration—either to trophic chains, crucial for coastal communities, or to the depths of lakes and oceans.

Carrying within them the processes of sedimentation and metamorphosis at work in the ocean, these optical glass sculptures made from diatoms will act as witnesses and tools for capturing this environment.