Salmon are anadromous fish: they are born in fresh water, then migrate to salt water to return to finish their days and lay their eggs at the place of their birth, thus crossing thousands of kilometers.
I imagined them going back up the watercolors of the course of La Vilaine painted by Sylvie Sauvageon, according to the original surveys of 1543. I saw them following the Rhône and crossing the same landscape as the one taken by Bertrand Stofleth, from the glacier of the Swiss Alps to the Mediterranean Sea.
I wondered if they could cross a smaller watercourse, like the one running alongside the village of Sainte-Colombe-en-Auxois, whose photographic portrait of the inhabitants was drawn by Rajak Ohanian. I saw them still moving forward, hesitant but tirelessly, like the drop of water in the film “1752 mètres et des poussières…” by Linda Sanchez.

Then I thought back to the documentary “La Rivière” by Dominique Marchais (2023) in which a researcher explains that through a tiny stone contained in the inner ear of salmon, composed of successive layers of calcium carbonate and proteins, he can glimpse the life history of the entire species.
What would the human “ear stone” be made of and what would it tell us? Would it resemble Gaëlle Foray’s fossils, composed of schists sedimented at a time when our mountains were still underwater?
If rocks have a memory of the evolution of our environment, what stigma are we leaving? This is partly one of the questions raised by Camille Llobet in her documentary essay “Pacheû” on the traces of climate change in the high mountains.

In another field of research, Guillaume Robert went to Goražde to rebuild a mini hydroelectric power station, with the help of the mechanic who initiated the design of similar machines in 1993 during the siege of the Serbian army in Bosnia. Its reactivation launched on the Drina is the subject of an eponymous film. By emphasizing the political dimension of the river, he also reminds us that human activity has always been intrinsically linked to water.
With the “Aster” project, Delphine Gigoux-Martin intervenes on another type of structure dedicated to the exploitation of waterways, the Saint-Étienne-Cantalès hydroelectric dam. Like the chimeras projected by the artist on the construction, we are ephemeral inhabitants, a layer sedimented by our activities on Earth.

In light of our exposed contradictions, Maxime Lamarche’s work “Midnightswim”, depicting a wreck of a Ford Taunus sinking in the water, keeps coming back to me with this nagging question: could this be the last midnight swim?