MAAT is hosting in its Gallery 1 an extensive exhibition of photographs, videos and sculptural pieces by Nicolas Floc'h (France, 1970). Through such a broad representation, the exhibition offers the Portuguese public enough information to get to know this artist’s body of work and deeper motivations. Floc'h, a renowned French photographer and one of the most important international names in photography that takes the sea as its central theme, is exhibiting his work in Portugal for the first time; and, also for the first time, he takes Portugal as a theme by developing his photographic work in the Tagus Estuary and the Azores.

MAAT provided him with the residency that gave rise to The Colour of Water – The Tagus River – a large mural made up of 408 photographs featuring the colours of the water in this river, specifically the stretch between Castanheira do Ribatejo and Bugio – and also partnered with Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas, Azores, in the expedition that allowed the artist to record the underwater hot springs off the island of São Miguel. The results are the dazzling colour scale of the river's waters and the dramatic images of seabeds stripped bare by the acidification of the archipelago's sulphurous waters.

Other photographic and video recordings made in areas as diverse as his native Brittany or the immense Mississippi river basin, where he carried out his most recent expedition, give us an idea of both the breadth of his enquiry and the diversity of the little-known underwater realities of our planet.

While Floc'h doesn't offer his work as an explicit climate manifesto, in its entirety, alongside his three-dimensional works, he does lead us to an ecological awareness. The mysterious and disquieting beauty of his images and his obsessive recording method are in themselves powerful testimonies to the artist's conscious attention to the delicate balance of marine ecosystems and to how we should relate to them both objectively and poetically.

It is the multiplicity of these paths that MAAT presents here, inviting us to be open to amazement, curiosity, and the desire to preserve the world around us.

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