Water in the City: A Photographic Series by GOBELINS Paris

Water flows through the city just as much as it constitutes it. It manifests itself there in its physical reality—as the fundamental substance of life—but also in a symbolic space, where it becomes an element of projection, representation, and thought. As a prerequisite for life, it structures urban environments just as much as it shapes social forms. Networks, infrastructure, landscapes, and everyday uses—the city unfolds in part through its flows. But water is also a source of narratives and systems of representation that extend and shift its meaning. In ancient Greco-Roman cultures, waters had their own divine figures, and ritual practices structured the relationships between humans and the natural environment.

Examining water in the city thus amounts to exploring a plurality of registers that oscillate between space and the imagination, between constraints and possibilities. In this regard, the photographic film serves as a space for inquiry as much as for sensory fiction, where the city reveals itself as an unstable organism, traversed by physical flows and narratives. At the intersection of cinematic film and photographic slideshows, this multimedia work takes the form of a short film, somewhere between a music video and a short film. It blends sound, still images, text, and graphics to tell a visual story created primarily from photographs. From early experiments with the movement of images in the 19th century—such as John Ayrton Paris’s thaumatrope or the chronophotography of Marey and Muybridge—to the short formats of the “ciné-tracts” produced under the impetus of Chris Marker in 1968, the animation of still images has demonstrated its narrative and expressive potential. Three key areas define the specific characteristics of this audiovisual art form: reappropriating cinematic techniques such as continuity shots; exploring photography in its stillness; and, finally, the blending of different media.

This exploration through photographic film is structured around four interconnected approaches, employed to probe the metabolic complexity of water. Water is first interpreted as a primary element of life and as a prerequisite for urban balance. It is then identified as a technical object, captured, controlled, and staged by infrastructures that redefine the forms of habitation. A third interpretive lens views water as a vehicle for the poetic and an extension of the sacred, serving as a medium for imaginaries, narratives, and sensory experiences. The final perspective, finally, perceives water as a breaking point, revealing boundaries and transitions between states, spaces, and perceptions, thereby contributing to the creation of desire and the tension within reality. Ultimately, water functions in this project as a descriptor of the urban landscape, revealing its dynamics, tensions, and transformations, and implicitly outlining a critical and sensitive interpretation of the contemporary city.

1 / Water: A Fundamental Metabolic Process

By replacing mythological narrative with an inquiry into nature, Thales developed a principle of reality^{By asserting that water is the archē (ἀρχή)—that is, the first principle, the origin, and the foundation of all things—Thales maintained that “everything comes from water.” (as reported by Aristotle in Metaphysics Book A)}: water is essential to life and, moreover, possesses the capacity for transformation (liquid, solid, vapor). Plato, in the Timaeus, emphasizes that what we call water is never a stable substance but a reality in perpetual flux. Water thus presents itself as a provisional form, a changing, perceptible manifestation. It acts as a polymorphic operator—that is, as an element capable of traversing, connecting, and transforming both the states of matter and the modes of perception. It shapes passages, transitions, and continuities.

On an urban scale, this conception invites us to view the city not as a structure but as a metabolic organism. In the photographic films by Jules Fouénard, Ulysse Yilan Liu, and Tilo Guétard, water plays a role analogous to that of blood or bodily fluids. It irrigates, transports, connects, dissolves, regulates, and halts, but it also becomes contaminated, infected, and suffocated; these are all forms of circulation that often escape the urban gaze yet penetrate our bodies. While photography tends to isolate a single state, photographic film allows us to approach its processual and metabolic dimension, making temporal continuities visible. From a simple tool for capture and representation, photographic film thus transforms into a device for medical knowledge, serving simultaneously as a “stethoscope” in the original sense (scope/to observe) and as an oximeter that records the pulse of the city-organism. To see is, in this context, already to interpret circulations, transformations, and metabolisms.

2 / Water, Hydraulic Machinery

Water in the city is collected, controlled, distributed, discharged, and staged. It flows through underground networks, passes through membranes, and accumulates in reservoirs. Straddling necessity and artificial construction, nature and technology, the urban water system persists in a state of invisibility that Anna de Zayas’s photographic film explores. In the sewers, a dense, laden, dark, subterranean, silent flow circulates out of sight, so much so that the underground acts as a mask, a technological artifact. These outflows are vital to the urban metabolism. The city cannot escape its own body, whose networks are intertwined. In this mirror metaphor, Aristotle, in The History of Animals, had already compared clogged blood vessels to canals filled with mud.

Urban water thus stems from a desire for control and separation, and Samuel Roustide’s photographic film captures the technical gestures of this Sisyphean labor. Mei Cholet’s work focuses on simulated dives in artificial pits and pools—sites of a technological staging of the aquatic realm where water is a controlled actor.

Thus technicized, water is not reduced to a utilitarian function. This “equipped” or “prosthetic” water actively participates in the construction of urban space. It produces thresholds, depths, surfaces, and continuities. These technocratic “prostheses” highlight a tension intrinsically linked to water’s primary properties—its instability and fluidity—which the city seeks to control, or even simulate. Between its disappearance into infrastructure and its reappearance in these systems, urban water oscillates between invisibility and hyper-visibility, implicitly revealing the contemporary dynamics of our relationship with the living world.

3 / Water: A Medium for the Sensory

Far from being merely a resource or even a backdrop, water serves as a principle of experience, a sensory medium that allows us to grasp, through the film, the complexity of a reality in perpetual transformation. We find here an echo of the ideas developed in Plato’s Timaeus: water is no longer the autonomous primordial principle it was for Thales, but rather an element embedded in an ordered cosmos, always in the process of becoming, always capable of becoming something else. Instability reveals the very nature of the sensible. In the city, despite control mechanisms, water surfaces, overflows, seeps, rushes down, flows through, invades, and then evaporates. It constantly eludes us through metamorphosis.

It is precisely in these often-discreet manifestations that the sensory becomes the preferred mode of access to this flow, making circulations perceptible and revealing the tensions between living beings and technical systems. We must therefore detour, slow down, observe, and grasp water as a mediator between infrastructure and experience, between an abstract technical system and perception. “It was near water that I best understood that reverie is a universe in emanation, a fragrant breath that emerges from things through the medium of a dreamer. ” Where Bachelard entrusts us with the mystical power of water, the films by Pascal Tianyu Ye, Plume Le Berre Tonneau, and Charlotte David de Tourdonnet convert us to this belief. As a bearer of imaginations and narratives, water becomes a vehicle for the poetic and an extension of the sacred.

4 / Water: Fictions of Depletion

In the students’ proposals, water also serves as a tool for critiquing reality. The ecological denial, overconsumption, and disappearance of nature that we are witnessing give rise to photographic films tinged with black humor. Water is a pivotal point from which everything can tip. First, in its most basic sense: water constitutes a boundary of life. Tehys Picard, for example, asked the AI to imagine Paris in an arid climate. The images are nothing more than fragmented scenes that mimic a dystopia: dead plants and cracked soil unfold one after another, accompanied by a perfectly neutral voice-over. This point of no return is treated like any other request, as the AI continues to waste the resource to generate images. The absurdity plays on a loop, unable to break free.

As we board the barge with Mélanie Rodriguez, we cross yet another threshold where “reality itself becomes an amusement park” (Baudrillard, 1996). The river, as a constituent element of nature, has been appropriated, and the banks of the Seine are no longer landscapes but signs. Photography serves to make the simulacrum perfectly authentic and to fix it in a new reality. We are sliding toward the commodification of nature.

Further still in the works of Youri Rodié-Talbère, the frenzied water—now the ecstasy of a world in the process of melting—escapes for one last moment from the final vintage bottles. Whether as the ultimate denial of a world in climatic peril or the inherent absurdity of a consumerist society, water has become a luxury. It points to an economy of representation where everything is already codified. As just one object among many, it fits into the logic of fabricating the visible and the desirable.

Corinne Feïss-Jehel (E.P.H.E, PSL, Histara) ; Pierre-Jerôme Jehel (GOBELINS Paris) ; Laetitia Guillemin (GOBELINS Paris)