Isabella Hin at the Sewer Museum for the Nuit Blanche

It is around 1900 that the legend of L’inconnue de la Seine takes shape. There is talk of an unidentified young woman who was found in the river and whose face, immortalized by a death mask, has become famous. It has inspired many artists, mainly writers, both in France and abroad, from Rainer Maria Rilke to Vladimir Nabokov (who even wrote an eponymous book: L’inconnue de la Seine in 1934). The plaster cast of her face was multiplied many times and became the face of the Resusci Anne doll, the famous training dummy used for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. This face used to teach mouth-to-mouth insufflation has taken on the nickname of “the most kissed woman in the world”.

In the perspective of a Seine that would become a bathing place in the near future, Isabella Hin is interested in this notion of reanimation. Victor Hugo, about the sewers, speaks of entrails, arteries, the other side of the scene, an intestinal double of Paris. It is a battle against asphyxiation which, like the Nuit Blanche, takes place in the dark. The purifying, cleansing relationship is very present in the discipline of swimming, as a form of bodily and psychic re-animation.

Isabella Hin develops the duality between the fixed image linked to the photographic medium and the movement of fluids. She is interested in the enigmatic and elusive nature of water, particularly dark water, to associate it with changing memory. Isabella graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017 and from the Fresnoy – Studio National in 2021. She has exhibited her work at the Musée la Piscine, Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Villa Noailles, Parcours Saint Germain and the LAM. She is currently responding to the photographic commission “En Creux” with the CRP/ after that of the CIP about the river Marne.

For the Nuit Blanche, Isabella Hin deploys at the Sewer Museum a sensory experience where the visitor is confronted with a multitude of images with immersed, liquefied and transformed subjects. Through a selection of photographs and video installations in which natural elements and bodies are gradually made liquid, Isabella Hin immerses us for a night in a dark and aquatic environment which, like the waters of the Seine, is still to be tamed.

Paris Sewer Museum

Esplanade Habib Bourguiba, Pont de l’Alma

75007 Paris