Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin & Caroline Laurin-Beaucage Une eau la nuit, 2021.
Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin & Caroline Laurin-Beaucage Bodies of Water, still photography, 2021.
Photo: Vivien Gaumand, courtesy of the artists

Immersed within Immersion: Bodies of Water

Tania Gallinaro
116 – Immersion Feature Caroline Laurin-Beaucage Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin
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Water has always permeated the history of human imagination as a symbol of life, rebirth, and transformation, but also as a threshold of mystery. Because of its transparency and reflective qualities, as well as its fluidity and mutability, water not only stimulates the senses, but integrates them, generating a profoundly synesthetic experience. In the twentieth century, it became a plastic element that progressively accompanied the dissolution of the classical framework based on linear perspective, transforming the subject represented into an experiential medium that ultimately enveloped the viewer within the exhibition space.

This “de-framing” process prefigured today’s shift from the visual arts to immersive technologies, in which the spectator no longer contemplates from a distance but enters the work itself. In this respect, water serves as a potent metaphor, from not only an aesthetic vantage point but a phenomenological one. Immersion in water and in virtual spaces invites a feeling of suspension, the loss of gravitational references, and disorientation — a condition that destabilizes ordinary perception and opens new modes of embodied awareness.

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Image de la couverture du numéro Esse 116 Immersion
This article also appears in the issue 116 - Immersion
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