The first time I came across Marcel Dinahet’s work was in the pages of an art magazine in the mid-1990s, which showed two underwater images of sunken objects: underwater sculptures. I myself, at the time, was obsessed by a sunken blockhaus, and I saw in those images an echo of my own preoccupations. Shortly thereafter, our paths crossed in the art world, and we subsequently shared suspended fields, from Cyprus to Amazonia, by way of Lebanon, within the dynamics of the Suspended spaces collective. This latter had shown us the way to Famagusta, one of the first sites we explored in the eastern part of the divided island of Cyprus. Those journeys and narratives experienced together helped me to gain a better acquaintanceship with the Marcel Dinahet “method”, as well as with the manoeuvres he discreetly undertook to be in touch with places and their inhabitants, human and non-human alike—a method which forges close links between the imagination and the activities of the mariner he himself is, with a poetics of apparatus which conveys nothing less than a state of physical awareness, known as kinaesthesia.

Fiction
Marcel Dinahet is a mobile artist, who moves about, travels and navigates, and works in a state of motion. Wherever he finds himself, he becomes involved with the elements which underpin the landscape of exchanges which sometimes conjure up shamanism, magical thinking, and superstition. Often keeping to the ridge-lines between water and air, land and sea, sand and river, ether and cloud, and water and fire, he makes kinds of rituals associated with an imaginary cosmology that presents the elements, visible and invisible alike. Involved here is a practice and not something mystic: in the beginning, the artist and sculptor Marcel Dinahet made objects conjuring up piles of matter tossed ashore by the sea, concrete pebbles, rope and shells; then he arranged them on the sea bed along the Breton shore, where they are either lost, or rediscovered after a certain time, altered by the action of submarine life. He recently rekindled this activity by submerging models of warships, airplanes, and cities, which he then filmed like the wrecks of a lost industrial modernity, or a forgotten war. Deposited on the sea bed, these artefacts swayed with the currents, just like the way his camera placed in a diving chamber swayed between air and water, in the series of videos made throughout the 2000s, on the waterline, evoking a vision that is more animal than human. Marcel Dinahet has been involved with real immersion, well before this became a metaphor for 3D simulation techniques. Keeping a keen eye on the transformations and metamorphoses of natural elements, he films a cloud until it evaporates in the blue of the sky, he films the tide rising and covering a vast expanse of sand at Cherrueix, he films a small flaming model thrown onto the sea at Fréhel, until it disappears, probably a tribute paid to the spirits of places, of the dead, and of nature. Marcel Dinahet is probably not a sorcier—a sorcerer—but rather a sourcier—a dowser, a water-diviner, which is an inherited gift. He knows how to sense the presence of water way down in the ground, and this enables him to communicate, without words, with all the dowsers in the world. This relation with the earth, what lies beneath it, and the invisible also seems to be at work in the dances, at times like trances, which he performs on beaches exposed at low tide, whose choreography he has recently re-enacted in great imprint-like drawings. These “circle” dances and dances on straight lines, punctuated by the sound of his footsteps on the wet sand, conjure up ritual Amerindian dances. The landscape thus traversed by running and dancing (Rubbed Landscapes) inscribes its horizon in the roundness of the earth. The globe becomes a small planet on which the artist runs the way he runs over the domes of Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings in Niterói and Tripoli, which are also cosmic representations. The starry sky, uncertain dawns, an abandoned factory, rivers and trees, all are so many thresholds and edges, where Marcel Dinahet stands, senses keened for the slightest vibration showing the porousness between the body (his body), nature, landscape, animal and vegetal, and memories of places. So, in a quite natural way, he was called سنبل (Sonbol), or “ear of wheat” by the inhabitants of Saïda in Lebanon, because he looked like a fisherman who had once lived in the town, according to a tradition consisting in giving the same name to people who look alike. For Sonbol, we understood “Symbol” and fiction whirred into action. Having become a character with an ambiguous name, Marcel Dinahet became part of the history of those parts, was included in a line of fishermen, lived in the town, and acted as an intermediary (or crossroads) once again between separate environments, of which he was the edge, the demarcation. Like an unflagging lucky charm, he is a go-between, and, like Sinbad the Sailor, for whom one of the sources is Homer’s Odyssey, with which Marcel Dinahet is familiar because he has embarked of representations of it on several islands, he travels amid a thousand and one nights and connects the forces felt in art forms that are both crude and extremely sensitive, thanks to highly sensitive apparatus.

The Poetics of Apparatus
Marcel Dinahet carefully chooses his technical apparatus so that he can simultaneously use it, and draw inspiration from it. Because, in the wake of Walter Benjamin, he knows that “nature talking to the camera is not the same as nature that talks to the eyes. It is different above all because it replaces the space where man’s consciousness is predominant with a space where the unconscious reigns.”1 This camera, he adds, opens us up to “visual unconsciousness”, which seems to me to be at work especially in his latest videos evoking the experimental films of the 20th century avant-gardes, made by such figures as László Moholy-Nagy, Len Lye, and Oskar Fischinger, in which abstract forms like reflections, showers of light, reliefs and hollows work the surface and matter of the image, like a sculpture. This visual unconsciousness, revealed by photography (but this goes for any camera) is made possible by this latter because it “shows and brings to the gaze a visible factor whose data are not peculiar to the eyes. In the photographic apparatus there is “a power of perception, a particular form of sensibility”, “a power to give to the world, and make a world” […]; “we see less what we want to than what is to be found in the possibilities of this apparatus”, we are reminded by Pierre-Damien Huyghe, replying to the observation made by Marcel Dinahet: “The camera sees better than I do”. The camera does not see—vision is a complex human faculty—, it captures and encodes light-related information, using an adjusted and adjustable system which at times produces surprising forms of technical events.
Marcel Dinahet knows how to handle the dowser’s divining rod, that ancestral practice involving communicating with non-visible nature, but he also knows how to handle the most sophisticated of technical objects, for the same reasons—catching something beyond what is visible, capturing, as they say in seismology, The Ghost in the Shell, the spirit in the machine, the ghost which withdraws into the apparatus. The ocean’s roar that you can hear in a sea-shell held to the ear is the most “natural” expression of this, and it is also the challenge of the video Le Cri des coquillages [The Cry of Shells], which literally transmits a sound produced by the rhythmic stamping (another dance?) on a carpet of sea-shells on a beach, filmed at very high speed by the Alpha 9 camera.2 This already mythical camera’s ultra-sensitive sensors in fact record data that are not perceptible in the human sensory consciousness, without the effect of specific psychotropic agents or exceptional gifts of extra-lucidity. Without mentioning spiritualism, time-storing technological apparatus, ever since Edison, the Lumière brothers and the Skladanowsky brothers, has always had to do with the visual unconsciousness, because it has an “availability to openness and […] once the apparatus is set in motion, once it is opened, the subject becomes absent, it is excluded by the very mechanics of the operation.” This is how the camera sees better than us, it is “a technical operator capable of operating by itself, an automaton”.3 Marcel Dinahet, who is well acquainted with the capacities of his recording instruments, also knows how to let go of things and be jubilantly surprised by the result, for he knows that by letting the apparatus do its thing, by suspending all manner of intentionality, something in the world will “become mechanically engram”, and this something interests him a lot, because it permits the emergence of novel and hitherto unseen forms created unbeknownst to him, but in his stead. Thus captured by an apparatus open like a trap, ghosts and fireflies, stars and clouds, currents and tides all come and play a coded score, like the Morse and international alpha codes which the artists knows well, because he is a mariner, and so he knows how to translate messages involving light and sound. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie is the beginning of a fiction which the camera—whose name refers to the code—fuels, by causing the events of the world, which we do not yet know how to name, to ring out, and take place, by accident.
By entering the dance with the artist, and by extending his body, the camera takes part in a kinaesthetic process, which is to say a conscious perception of the body’s movements, which images, with their tactile textures, translate in a very carnal way, or, conversely, in a very abstract and mineral manner. Imprints, made after the fact, barefoot, in the solitude of the studio, act like memories of dances performed in the field. Another inscription, another memory, that of emotions recalled by contact with the ground, the earth, and the world. Feet on the ground, and head in the stars, Marcel Dinahet stands on the edge of a paradise, not as lost as all that.