La Baignoire / The Bathtub

Ongoing project, video in editing.

La baignoire / The Bathtub is a performative installation from which a video, captured by and concieved with Elliot Gaillardon, extends and reconfigures the experience. It takes as its starting point a bathtub displaced from its domestic context and conceived as the artificial enclosure of a body maintained in a state of dormancy.

Situated at the intersection of performance and experimental video, the project reflects on the conditions under which bodies transform within constrained environments. It questions our ways of inhabiting the world by reconfiguring the boundaries between natural and artificial, human and non-human, visible and audible. It asserts a presence that refuses disappearance by activating a poetics of breath, survival and self-reinvention. The work explores the body’s capacity for persistence, its envelope and its traces, and diverts the recurring figure of the drowned woman in the history of images in order to propose a figure of resistance.

The object becomes an active envelope, an extended membrane where phenomena of pressure, humidity and transformation unfold. Raw clay, along with elements in silicone and ceramic, are deposited within it. The materials contract, crack, grow heavier or stabilise slowly under the effects of time, weight and infused air. The transformations are gradual, almost imperceptible, as if the object were entering a state of dormancy, a trans-species biological strategy that suspends activity in order to persist.

A snorkel specially designed for the project with freediver and artist Emile Mold extends the bathtub like an external organ. 3D-printed, it functions as a respiratory prosthesis, an interface between human breath and this inert organism. The respiration is not simulated but physically transmitted. It circulates intermittently, maintaining the object in an ambiguous zone between sleep and activation. The breath does not seek to fully animate; it suspends, delays and sustains a threshold.
The video adopts an organic gaze, close to the materials, attentive to tremors, collapses and resistances. Movements remain minimal: slight liftings, micro-shifts, internal tensions. The image does not dramatise; it accompanies a state of latency.

La baignoire / The Bathtub may take several forms in exhibition. It can be physically installed in the space, activated or left silent, accompanied by the video projection and a discreet sound environment in which the circulation of air can be perceived.

It may also exist solely as a projection; the bathtub then becomes image and environment. In this configuration, additional elements extend its presence and integrate it into the space: textiles, low seating, subdued lighting, plaster flowers or fragments of material. These extensions compose an environment that is both hospitable and ambiguous, somewhere between a resting chamber, a terrarium and an artificial set, prolonging the project’s logic of membrane and dormancy.