During the expedition “A Tale of Two Submarine Canyons” with the Schmidt Ocean Institute, I created a series of wave-made paintings — ink moving on stone paper, guided by the sea’s own gesture. Using sediments collected by the ROV, I composed a collage that merged matter from the deep with seafloor maps as they were drawn in real-time.

My live performance, I glow, therefore I vanish, unfolded during one of the ROV dives and was streamed online. I created an immersive piece using projections on seawater and drawings on dissolving paper — exploring how light, language, and deep-sea life echo one another in a fragile choreography of disappearance and transformation, inspired by bioluminescence.

This body of work continues in a forthcoming film — a speculative fiction set in the abyss, where human and non-human beings confront the intertwined questions of extraction, coexistence, and shared vulnerability in the deep.

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Christine Laquet is a French visual artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of environmental inquiry, speculative thinking, and embodied experience. Her long-term research has explored meteorites carrying traces of the origins of life, cyanobacteria that later gave rise to it, or the return of the wolf as a contested figure of fear and resilience. More recently, her trajectory has turned toward the ocean, where micro- and macro-organisms — from plankton to algae —invite her to embrace symbiosis as both a biological necessity and a philosophical stance. Working across installation, performance, film, and painting, Laquet creates immersive environments that reorient perception, decenter the human gaze, and open new ways of sensing and coexisting with the living. She has exhibited internationally in institutions such as the Contemporary Art Museum A. Magalhães (Brazil), the PyeongChang Biennale (Korea), Zamek Culture Center (Poland), BUG Gallery (Thailand), and more recently at NAC Xiamen (China). Her work has also been shown in France and abroad — from New York to Bangkok, Innsbruck, Poznań, São Paulo, Seoul, or Aarhus — and is represented in both private and public collections, including the FNAC (Paris) and FRAC Pays de la Loire. A graduate of the École  Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and ECAL Lausanne, she has received numerous grants and residencies, among them the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s “Artist at Sea”, ARoS Aarhus, Pioneer Works New York, and ADAGP research grants. At a time of ecological urgency, her practice resonates as a call to attunement, empathy, and transformation.