What the Ocean Breaks, Our Bodies Connect, 2025

An ecofeminist exploration linking the coastal landscapes of Canada and France, this project reflects on how the transformations of land and female bodies mirror each other, revealing shared histories of of erosion, resilience, and resistance.

What the Ocean Separates, Our Bodies Connect | MAUDE ARSENAULT

What the Ocean Separates, Our Bodies Connect is an artistic, geographic, and poetic journey between two coastal territories — Gaspésie and Picardy — divided by an ocean yet united by shared lines of fracture: erosion, crumbling, the memory of bodies, and the transformation of shores. This exhibition, the result of a research-creation project conducted between Quebec and France, continues the reflection begun with Navigating an Ocean of Flesh, presented in Carleton-sur-Mer, Gaspésie, in the summer of 2024. Invited jointly by Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie and Diaphane – Pôle photographique en Hauts-de-France, the artist engages here in a transatlantic dialogue between the shores of Quebec and those of France.

These two territories, facing each other across the Atlantic, become poles of a shared inquiry into the transformations of female bodies and shifting geographies. Gaspésie, with its wild headlands, and Picardy, with its fragile cliffs, each recount in their own way the impact of time, climate, extractive politics, and ancestral legacies on living forms, whether human or earthly.

On the Picard coast in autumn 2024, the artist undertook a nomadic residency, capturing through photography and performance the sensitive layers of the landscape. Through the presence of her own body, sculptural gestures in situ, and acts of poetic resistance, she inscribed her subjectivity in a foreign land, seeking echoes of her explorations along the Gaspesian shores.

In this photographic and interdisciplinary work, the notions of collapse, resilience, and transformation lie at the heart of the dialogue between body and territory. The artist’s gaze upon these coastal landscapes—crisis-stricken shores, unstable lands, cliffs eroded by the sea—is also a political gaze on the systems of power inscribed upon female bodies: their burdens, oppressions, and silences, but also their resistances, their archives, their regenerative power.

Through an ecofeminist approach, the exhibition explores how landscapes and bodies inform one another, becoming witnesses to a world on the brink—caught between climate upheaval and social fracture. Europe, marked by history, and America, haunted by its promises and violences, mirror one another as two asymmetrical reflections bearing a living memory.

What the Ocean Separates, Our Bodies Connect thus becomes a space of junction: between two parallel projects, two continents, two shores—but also between the visible and the invisible, between the materiality of the land and the flesh that inhabits it. It is an attempt to grasp, within the fracture, the distance, and erosion itself, a form of presence, protection, and resistance.