EXHIBITIONS
2019
"In the plastic footsteps of Magellan"
"The graphic and photographic installation proposed by the Fondation Pacifique and the Oceaneye association tells a small part of this nightmarish story that has only just begun: the colonisation of the world by plastic. It sheds light on the ambivalence of our relationship with this material, which has become an indispensable part of our everyday lives. Under the eye of Geneva photographer Fred Merz, these magnified fragments of microplastic are astonishing, in their profusion of shapes and shimmering colours. Do they not belong to the plant world? Animal? Mineral?
No, they are indeed plastic debris, found in almost every one of the 208 seawater samples collected by the Fleur de Passion sailing boat and analysed by e Oceaneye biologists as part of The Ocean Mapping Expedition, a four-and-a-half year round-the-world voyage in the wake of Magellan, from April 2015 to September 2019."
After an initial installation in 2019 at the Théâtre de l'Orangerie, the exhibition was offered to students at Collège Voltaire, and in 2020 the scenography was reproduced by students at the Centre de Formation Professionnelle Arts (CFP Arts) in Geneva as part of a practical workshop.
2017
"Our spice island"
"Some 500 years after Ferdinand Magellan, what is our spice island? Not literally, but figuratively. In a world of increasingly scarce resources, what material, but also and above all spiritual, riches do we need to discover if we are to rethink our relationship with the planet sea in a viable and sustainable way? To reinvent peaceful links between our fellow human beings?
The 'Our Spice Island' exhibition invites you to come on board The Ocean Mapping Expedition, a 4-year (2015-2019) round-the-world sailing expedition in the wake of the famous Portuguese navigator, combining science, education and culture. It offers food for thought for this unique expedition, in a game of mirrors between past and present, present and future.
Setting off in the wake of Magellan is, in a way, a return to the spirit of the great explorations and discoveries of past centuries, which continue to capture the imagination. But we must be careful not to create a fantasised, idealised representation of them. Nor is it a question of reproducing a chapter in human history that belongs to a bygone era.
Magellan's expedition (1519-1522) is, on the contrary, a pretext for setting off to observe the oceans as they are today. In this way, The Ocean Mapping Expedition is an opportunity to question our world today, and to reflect on environmental issues and mankind's relationship with planet Earth in the light of a number of major timeless themes: the quest for knowledge and discovery, but also the capacity not to know or not to want to know; access to wealth and its distribution; the spirit of territorial, commercial, cultural and ideological conquest that we find so hard to shake off; the irrepressible quest for power and domination; or, on the contrary, the quest for a better way of living together, the utopian dream of a world at peace, disarmed as Fleur de Passion, the expedition sailboat at the centre of today's adventure, once was. "
On show from September 2017 to January 2018 at the Bibliothèque de la Cité in Geneva, the exhibition was then presented at the General Archives of India in Seville in 2019, at the end of the Fleur de Passion's round-the-world voyage.
