Ariane Michel, Hugues et les vagues, 2018

This video is one of the forms resulting from the project The Rhetoric of the Tides, which Ariane Michel initiated in 2015. She invited twenty artists to work on a wild shore of the Audierne coast, in Finistère, France. For this “coastal exhibition”, which was also a filming location for her, the idea was to subject the artistic gesture to contact with the elements, and in particular the sea. This film is the result of the collaboration with Hugues Reip, who played the game to the full, his installation Wavers, 2015-18, a garden proliferating in a puddle between the rocks, having been swept away by the first tide. Looking for the point of view of everything that lives there - rocks, limpets, algae and waves - Ariane Michel observes the work’s future in the midst of the elements. Following the flowers to the bottom of the waves, she chooses to be part of the landscape to better make us feel its presence.