Mare Sapiens, Mare Sapiens

Mare Sapiens grew out of the Fabrique des Écritures Ethnographiques, an experimental research environment at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences and the creative and artistic disciplines directed by Boris Petric. It all started with PrésHuMer, an interdisciplinary research project that brought oceanographers and anthropologists together to study human pressures beneath the sea. We approached the Bay of Marseille, as a social landscape where human and marine communities meet, and we asked what can be perceived of human presence below the surface.

The work was sonic from the start. Using hydrophones, we recorded maritime traffic and industrial sound below the surface, making regular missions across the bay with the oceanographers of the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography (MIO). The early fieldwork led to the production of a short sound piece, Beyond Silence. We later drew on the archives of one of our MIO collaborators, the marine biologist Sandrine Ruitton, who has been filming her fieldwork in the bay for decades. From these archives as well as new material we produced the research film, Under Pressure.

At the point where the PrésHuMer research project was ending, we felt like we were only just beginning to arrive into the depths of our initial questions and we wanted to carry the work further. Aurélie with her background in multimodal documentary and collaborative research, and Jeff coming from a practice in sensory ethnography and experimental documentary, we were drawn to what the sea sounded like as much as what it looked like. We began filming Mare Sapiens in 2024 with the ambition of moving from a research film toward a more fully cinematic work, one that could hold the Mediterranean and the Bay of Marseille in their full complexity. The project continues to grow across cinema, research and artistic boundaries, extending into the multi-screen installation Nous la mer / We, the Sea.

There were many, and they shaped the film as much as they slowed it down. The first and most decisive were the physical conditions of the sea and the safety of our team. Our shooting schedule was always in flux. Strong mistral winds repeatedly forced us to reschedule, and a window that looked good in the morning could close by the afternoon. We learned to work on the sea’s terms rather than against them.

Filming and recording underwater added its own order of difficulty. We worked with divers on closed-circuit rebreathers to let the divers stay down far longer and, just as important, let us record with our hydrophones in sync with the image, without the sound of breathing in the take. It took a lengthy investigation to work out exactly what we wanted to film, where, and how to get there – which is not always straightforward in an environment that defies our earthly senses. Finally, it took a very long time to obtain certain filming permits. The sea is less of a shared space, a place of freedom and community, than we might sometimes like to believe!

From the start we chose to work without a guiding voice, trusting perception over explanation. This comes out of a sensory approach to ethnography: we would rather let the viewer sense these spaces than be told what to think about them. Accepting ambiguity is what lets the film hold two things at once. We did not want it to settle into ecological alarm, nor into pure contemplative beauty. The dismay in front of certain destructions and the wonder in front of certain encounters are not opposites to be resolved. They coexist, the way the tension between humans and the more-than-human world coexists in the bay itself.

The divers at Île Verte are a good example. Filmed from a distance, a group of recreational divers moves through the water like a school of fish, folded into the very world they came to see. And yet the same image is also one of pressure. By a conservative estimate, around 250,000 dives are made along the Marseille coast each year, concentrated at a handful of sites and mostly in summer. Diving tends to be read as a sign of attachment to the sea rather than a strain on it. That single image holds both the wonder and the unease, and we wanted to leave it there, unresolved. The white ribbon works the other way. It is a Venus belt, Cestum veneris, a transparent, ribbon-like creature, a rare sight that Sandrine Ruitton managed to film. We were seduced by its beauty, and we wanted to hold on to some of what still resists in spite of the pressures on this ecosystem.