French artist Laure Prouvost has created a powerful and immersive installation that explores the connection between motherhood and the Mediterranean Sea at Marseille's Centre de la Vieille Charité. The exhibition "Mère We Sea" features a striking pink breast suspended from the ceiling that gazes downward like a large drop of maternal milk, surrounded by dozens of floating fish that evoke a mobile above a child's bed.
Visitors are invited to walk around and sit within the installation while being embraced by a soundtrack composed of songs and voices - memories of former residents of the Vieille Charité, a former hospice dedicated to housing and confining the poor and indigent in Marseille. The experience creates a strange, timeless moment that feels suspended outside of ordinary reality.
Prouvost, born in 1978 and France's representative at the 2019 Venice Biennale, was invited by the institution in the Panier district to produce an original work alongside her two other exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mucem. Co-curator Stéphanie Airaud describes the piece as "a subjective, sensual, immersive and ambiguous work, like an organ where voices, songs, fish and body fragments float, all interconnected with each other and with the visitors."
True to her collaborative approach, Prouvost enlisted the help of glassblowers from Murano for the sculptures, social science researchers from EHESS Marseille housed within the walls of the Vieille Charité for the recorded testimonies, and the conservatory choir for the songs. This brought together a crowd of sensibilities and stories into her artistic adventure.
The resulting installation plays on the French words for sea ("mer") and mother ("mère"), imagining the Mediterranean as a nurturing entity whose children are the fish and algae of its depths. The dreamlike work is also highly readable and evident, emerging with feminine force within the curved architecture of the Vieille Charité chapel, marked by the roundness of its arcades and its ample rotunda.
Co-curator Nicolas Misery explains that "the first exchanges around this project date back to the end of summer 2021. Their memory evokes in several ways the idea of a birth: pregnant while she was sketching her first inspirations, Laure Prouvost was amused by the surprising echoes between the forms of her body and the volumes of the Charity chapel."
On the floor, a translucent and sculptural puddle reinforces the installation's sensuality, bringing an ephemeral element - water that will not evaporate - into the work's eternity. This reinforces the idea of fluidity dear to the artist, who constantly weaves connections between humans, animals, plants, and landscapes through her multi-media installations.
The exhibition represents a true success, somewhat surrealist in form and animated by a tender sensitivity to the experience of motherhood. "Mère We Sea" runs from April 2, 2025, to January 11, 2026, at the Centre de la Vieille Charité in Marseille, located at 2 Rue de la Charité in the 13002 district.
