Musée du quai Branly

'The seafaring studio summarises this essential position of Titouan Lamazou. It is a movement at the periphery of fragile worlds. It is the celebration of relationship, exchange and slowness. It is the thought in the face of the unthought. It is the beating heart of the thousand journeys its creator has made and will make to reach what seemed to us distant yet is close to us.' Jean de Loisy

This exhibition pays tribute to the enormous astronomical knowledge of the Oceanian people. Guided by the stars, aboard the most sophisticated ships ever imagined by Sapiens, men and women of the Pacific discovered all the archipelagos of the biggest ocean in the world. And this was hundreds of years before our "discoverers" inaugurated the very recent European colonial era, the manifestations of which still haunt this world.

Here are gathered the wakes of my life: those of Wandering and Diverse, reliant on the thoughts of Victor Segalen and Édouard Glissant; my youthful inspirations – the writings of Stevenson and London, the paintings of Gauguin, all of whom travelled through Oceania in their time; the authors and artists whose work causes echoes in me – Patrick Chamoiseau, Chantal Spitz, Romuald Hazoumé, Peter Doig; 

researchers who have thought about the memory, the history and the present of these elsewheres – the anthropologist Epeli Hau'ofa, the historian and the archaeologist Marie-Noëlle and Pierre Ottino-Garanger; the contemporary Oceanians who were kind enough to relate to me their edifying journeys.

Here, at last, is Nature: the diversity of the living in general and the biodiversity to which the human being belongs in particular.

This is the motley crew of my seafaring studio. This exhibition, a journey through the Marquesas archipelago, with a Caribbean port of call and a detour through Tahiti.

In many ways, my marine utopia falls under the concept of Relationship developed by Édouard Glissant.

Welcome aboard!

Titouan Lamazou