Définitions vagues: An Anthology of Water
Définitions vagues: An Anthology of Water is a book linked to an archive of videos, where each entry leads to the image it describes. The project gathers the videos of water I have been filming since 2014 in northern and Arctic regions. It now holds hundreds of recordings and continues to grow.
Each video has its own entry, printed and digitized, bringing together a frame from the video, a drawing, the date, the place, the state of the water and a note written in the moment. The entries are at the heart of the project: they can be leafed through like a book, used to find the video of a given place and day, or to bring together two waters filmed years apart.
Filming and writing about water is a way of taking the time to look at it. The anthology reads like a logbook, kept from a boat or a shore, across seasons and places.
Through this anthology, I hope to share this approach and to gather the images of water that moved me at particular moments of my life, at a time when the environment is changing profoundly.
The collection currently covers the St. Lawrence River and Gulf, the Côte‑Nord, Anticosti Island, the Saguenay, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Iceland, the Svalbard archipelago, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, along the Dempster Highway to the shores of the Arctic Ocean in Canada. It grows one expedition at a time.
Next expedition: Fogo Island, Newfoundland, in March.