The Drunken Boat Paris 2019–2023

The title The Drunken Boat refers to the poem of the same name by Arthur Rimbaud, in which he uses the image of a boat to represent a man's journey in life. In a poetic photographic essay structured like a play In a five-act play, Martin Essl redraws the contours of a city in transformation and composes an abstract and contemporary map of Paris. "The Drunken Boat takes us on a Parisian journey that shows the eternal return of the same, like a curtain that opens and closes endlessly. As if diluted and transformed, under the influence of variations around cold colors, the space Parisian gradually becomes acqua alta, the geographical, social borders, cultural and temporal are dissolved." (Sarah Sauquet)