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Paper short abstract

A reflection on practicing multimodal anthropology through an ethnographic film and a five-screen installation emerging from underwater fieldwork in Marseille's bay. We ask how immersive image and sound can shift perception of marine environments from spectacle toward uncertain entanglement.

Paper long abstract

What does it mean to practice multimodal anthropology with water, taken as medium, collaborator, and site of inquiry rather than as metaphor? This contribution reflects on Mare Sapiens, a 28-minute ethnographic film premiered at FID Marseille 2026, and Nous la mer, a five-screen installation with twelve channels of spatialized sound, on view May through August at the Centre de la Vieille Charité. Both distill four years of underwater fieldwork with marine scientists in the bay of Marseille.

Film and installation immerse audiences in a marine environment that refuses the conventions of underwater spectacle: wonder, revelation, mastery. Our camera adopts a decentered perspective, holding fixed positions in long takes filmed with natural light, where gorgonians and octopuses appear to observe divers as guests or intruders. Camera and hydrophone act as "hydro-sensory" extensions, the medium of water transforming what can be seen and heard. Where the film binds this material into a single montage, the installation disperses it across suspended screens and surrounding sound: boat engines, humming infrastructure, crackling organisms in an acoustically saturated world. Each visitor becomes the editor of their own film. Rather than guiding perception, both works invite dwelling in what remains uncertain.

Responding to the panel's call for depolarization, we hold complexity without resolving it into argument. The sea emerges as a space saturated with entanglement, irreducible to pristine elsewhere or degraded resource. We ask how such practice might contribute to blue anthropology, shifting perception from extraction toward cohabitation through the watery quality of ambiguity itself.