SOUS L’HORIZON – EXPOSITION LES EXTATIQUES

EXHIBITION – UNDER THE HORIZON

APRIL 3 TO 26, 2026

SALLES DES COLONNES – PARIS LA DÉFENSE

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Most of the world pulsates outside our gaze. It begins below the horizon, in a liquid space where light dissolves in just a few meters. It was here, under a pressure equivalent to the weight of a skyscraper on a fingertip, that life emerged over 3.5 billion years ago. It invented bioluminescence long before fire, symbioses long before forests, and coral architecture long before our cities.

The ocean, which covers 70% of the earth’s surface and regulates the climate, absorbs 90% of the excess heat caused by climate change every day. It produces more than half the oxygen we breathe. It is the Earth’s first lung, the first beating heart of all living things. And yet, over 80% of its seabed remains unexplored.

This exhibition is a plunge into this other world still in the making in our imaginations. It opens up like a submarine hatch or the breach in a wreck overgrown with algae, in a transformed interstitial space that unfolds beneath the Grande Arche. In this Salle des Colonnes, four artists unfurl their seafaring universes to create a poetic, sensory journey.

Guided by a narrative composed by Mariette Navarro and narrated by Emily Loizeau, whose language navigates between oceanographic reality and abyssal fiction, visitors stroll in the dark, gathered in a small group, headphones on, flashlight in hand, in a dive that not only tells the story of the ocean, but makes us vulnerable, attentive, porous to it – as if our bodies were breathing through our gills again.

The descent begins to the sound of the oceanic microbiome: the trillions of micro-organisms that transform carbon, nourish the food chain and have always shaped the invisible balance of our planet. They gradually give way to the heartbeat of a fish, resonated by Antoine Bertin like a living sonar.

Further into the depths, visitors enter Ugo Schiavi’s Midnight Zone, where light disappears completely, beyond a depth of 1,000 meters. This is the space of impossible creatures: ghostly jellyfish, fish with translucent teeth, organisms 90% of which are still unknown. Schiavi’s videos and sculptures, floating and mutant, seem to emerge from this cosmic silt where mythologies, collapsed futures and waste brought up from the surface meet.

Then comes the territory of bioluminescence, revealed by Jérémie Brugidou. Here, visitors encounter living light. True photo-bacteria, tiny beings that emit a glow born without sunlight, a light created by living beings themselves. In the depths, this light is a language – to attract, repel, seduce, deceive, survive. Over 75% of abyssal species use it. Brugidou introduces us to this secret grammar, like so many chapters in a history of the world written in the dark.

The journey ends in a sacred cave, a retreat from the world dedicated to Yemayá, mother-goddess of the oceans. For Shivay La Multiple, conceiving this space means re-enacting the primordial gesture of being enveloped, carried and cradled by water. The installation becomes a place of recollection, an inner chamber where each of us rediscovers what the sea has left in us: our saline memory, our ancient vulnerability, our belonging to the living.

For the ocean is not just a landscape: it’s our origin, our future, our breath. And it is perhaps in its night that the possibility of a new imaginary world still lies.

Echoing the exhibition Under the Horizon, the first Secret Societies in the form of Science Bars, will take place, offering a moment of relaxation and exchange with scientists and artists from the exhibition.

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THE ARTISTS

Antoine Bertin, born in 1985, lives in Paris.

Antoine Bertin explores the shifting boundaries between science, nature and perception, combining field-recording, data sonification, musical narration and sensitive immersion. His work takes the form of listening experiences, audio meditations or soundscapes respectful of living things: the breath of the wind, the pulsar of a microbial ecosystem, the silent song of forests or oceans.

His achievements include installations and performances presented in avant-garde venues such as Tate Britain, Palais de Tokyo, Serpentine Gallery and innovative festivals (KIKK Festival, STRP Festival, Sonar+D). Since 2018, he has directed the Paris-based creative studio Sound Anything, a veritable sound laboratory that designs hybrid works blending ecology, data and immersion.

Ugo Schiavi born 1987 in Paris, France. Lives and works in Marseille, France.

Ugo Schiavi’s work lies at the crossroads of time, blending the contemporary with antiquity in strange forms that resonate with collective memory. Playing on the tensions between past and present – as part of a fictional archaeology – his work gives rise to captivating narratives, oscillating between strength and fragility, fiction and history.

His work has been presented at the Biennale de Lyon (2022), Voyage à Nantes (2021) and Nuit Blanche (2018). He has also had solo exhibitions at the Centre d’Art Bastille in Grenoble (2022), the Musée Réattu in Arles (2021) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans (2019).

Jeremie Brugidou was born in 1988 and works in Marseille.

Jérémie Brugidou positions himself as a “para-disciplinary” artist-researcher. After studying art and cinema (with a doctorate in film studies from the École Normale Supérieure LSH), he developed a practice at the crossroads of aesthetics, anthropology, ethology and ecosophy. His work combines visual arts, documentary, installation and research. He is now a research fellow at the CNRS, in the PRISM research-creation laboratory.

His fields of research and creation include the study of marine ecosystems, bioluminescence, natural rhythms, inter-species relationships and the living as memory and possible future. Her approach, both reflexive and immersive, places art as a space for investigation, questioning and reverie, reinventing our relationship with the living world. This work is made possible thanks to the support of the Institut Méditerranéen d’Océanologie, which has been collaborating with Jeremie on bioluminescence for several years.

Shivay La Multiple born in 1993, she divides her time between Paris and Nouméa (New Caledonia / Kanaky).

Shivay La Multiple is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the territories of the sacred, memory, inner metamorphoses and the links between body, nature and spirituality. Her work combines performance, immersive installations, organic materials, sensitive matter and contemporary rituals. Through her creations, Shivay La Multiple invites contemplation, introspection and reconnection.

His work has been shown at a number of international venues and events: Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Cité des Arts, Espace 29, Magasin CNAC Grenoble, Gaîté Lyrique, the Dakar Biennale, and the Lyon Biennale (in the young creation section).