In collaboration with Les Documents Cinématographiques (Jean Painlevé archives).

Ligia Dias, Geneviève Hamon, Marie Jager, Sachin Kaeley, Genêt Mayor, Christian Newby, Jean Painlevé, Pierre Paulin, Bruno Persat, Mary Ping, Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Clément Rodzielski, Analia Saban, We Are The Painters, Pedro Wirz, Gerda Åkesson

In 1934, Jean Painlevé and the Comandant Yves Le Prieur created the Club des Sous l’Eau (‘Underwater Club’*). The group, inventors, artists and friends, all of them amateur divers looking for adventure, was devoted to the promotion and development of diving and underwater photography.

Le Club des Sous l’Eau is a project that consists of a group exhibition, a film program, concerts and a round table discussion. The project gathers together artworks, jewelry, diving gear, never-before-shown documents from the Painlevé archives and selected interventions. In this reactivated version, each participant will become a potential member of the “Club des Sous l’Eau.”

Jean Painlevé is considered to be one of the founding fathers of scientific cinema. Having directed more than 200 films, he was initially despised by the scientific community, who viewed cinema as an unfit and unserious tool for scientific observation, but shortly after he was noticed by the surrealists, who admired his evocative film aesthetic.

Through the constant curiosity that guided him throughout his life, Jean Painlevé’s body of work is both fertile and multifaceted, bringing together art and science, documentary cinema and communication, anti-fascist politics, underwater diving, adventure, the production of fabrics, wallpaper and even jewelry, based on the filmmaker’s favorite motifs — seahorses, seaweeds, and shrimps.

* Club des Sous l’Eau is a pun in french: sous l’eau means “underwater,” which is a homonym of soûlaud, “drunkard”