With Initium Maris, the inaugural series of a long term project titled Productive Landscapes, Nicolas Floc’h reveals the underwater landscapes in the west of France, from the coasts of Brittany to the Loire-Atlantique. In dialogue with scientists, the artist is on a mission to represent the underwater landscapes at a time when climate change is causing major upheavals within ecosystems.

For Initium Maris Nicolas Floc’h dived into the coastal waters of Brittany with his camera, revealing the serene, surreal, and astonishingly organic underwater landscapes he finds there. Taken between 2015 and 2021, this series of photographs is framed by the notion of the sea as paradox: both the original place from where terrestrial life emerged and autonomous, a place that has continued to exist, assuming other forms and faces. Seas are places where the distinction between extension and space becomes irrelevant, but also where traditional metrics collapse, giving way to materiality in perpetual motion. A space for multiplying and diversifying forms of life on this planet.