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Paper short abstract

This paper reflects on practicing multimodal anthropology through a multi-screen audiovisual 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—not as metaphor but as medium, collaborator, and site of inquiry? This contribution reflects on a five-screen audiovisual installation with eighteen channels of spatialized sound, opening May 2026 at the Musée de la Vieille Charité in Marseille. The work functions as a multimodal analysis of three years of underwater fieldwork conducted with marine scientists in the Bay of Marseille.

It immerses visitors in a marine environment that refuses the conventions of underwater spectacle—wonder, revelation, mastery. Fragmented footage plays across suspended screens while spatialized sound surrounds: boat engines rumbling, infrastructure humming, the clicks and crackle of marine organisms navigating an acoustically saturated world. 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. Methodologically, we explore how camera and hydrophone act as "hydro-sensory" extensions, where the medium of water transforms what can be seen and heard. Rather than guiding perception, the installation invites dwelling in what remains uncertain.

Drawing on sensory ethnographic methods, the audiovisual installation renders perceptible what typically escapes terrestrial attention. In response to the panel's call for depolarization, we hold complexity without resolving it into argument. The sea emerges neither as pristine elsewhere nor degraded resource, but as a space already saturated with entanglement. We ask how such immersive practice might contribute to blue anthropology—shifting perception from extraction toward cohabitation, not through didacticism, but through the watery quality of ambiguity itself.