IN IMAGES
When Sea and Sky are Torn Apart
Presented at the Planches Contact and Photo Days festivals in France, Marilia Destot’s series “Memoryscapes” brings together seascapes permeated by memory and emotion. Capturing mist, light, and movement, the photographer turns photography into a meditative space between reality and remembrance.
By Jonas Cuénin. Photos by Marilia Destot.
Between the cliffs and the sea, Marilia Destot captures the fragility of the visible. Her landscapes, made of traces and tears, draw a suspended memory. Each image seems to be born from a slow breath, poised between absence and recollection.
The waves fade, repeat, crumble like words that slip away. Marilia Destot photographs the sea as one listens to silence—attentive, inward. The gesture of the hand, which later tears the paper, becomes a second kind of light.
These tears are fine and delicate. Here, they replace the boundary between stone and sand; there, they mimic the foam of the waves. Sometimes they are lightning flashes in the blue night or the gray sky. It is an alteration of the image that is both simple and beautiful, without artifice, and thus so precisely conceived.
At times, a bird crosses the frame, a branch cuts through the fog, a burst of foam brightens the surface. These are minute, almost invisible presences, yet they breathe life back into the whole. Every trace, every tear, speaks of passage.
In these horizons shared between sky and sea, time stretches out. The image cracks, then rebuilds itself. The photographic material becomes alive, porous, ready to dissolve. Marilia Destot also questions what slips away from us: impermanence, transparency, disappearance. Her works invite us to look closely, to pay attention—especially where something seems to vanish.
“Memoryscapes,” by Marilia Destot, is on view until January 5, 2026, at the Planches Contact Festival in Deauville, and until November 30, 2025, at We Are Club in Paris, as part of the Photo Days festival.
