“Le Voyage Liquide”
Éric Watt

The town of Frossay has a very diverse cultural patrimony, consequence of a time when the town was benefiting from its close proximity with the port of Migron, economic hub and a stop for pilgrims on their way to Compostello. The Champs Neuf Machinery was up and running in 1892 and was restored in 2008.

Éric Watt is a video director and a visual artist born in 1964, whose work is at the meeting point between documentaries, fictions and video art. The spectator is then led to reflect on a social, poetic and political level. Often working with inhabitants of a limited territory, Éric Watt sets up work communities with people met during his creations; through this process, these people become the “transmitters-receivers” (as he likes to call them) of a district, a quarter, a town, an erea.

For Le voyage liquide (“Liquid Journey”), he went back to the root of the Loire River, at Mont-Gerbier-de-Jonc. There, he associated the shape of the volcanic deject cone with the Tower of Babel, a famous Bruegel’s painting. By linking the biblical myth to the Loire River, the artist followed the stream of the river. He stopped at each and every bridge of the way to record a story, a word, snatches of language carried along by the river to the ocean. A vast and contemplative portrait of the river, Le voyage liquide is a video installation that was be presented as a feature film.

— Film produit par Xénia Maingot, Eaux-vives Productions. Assistante de réalisation Valérie Rabinovitch.

Artwork audio commentary