How the Ocean Lit Up
Images
Presentation Colophon
1/6
2/6
3/6
4/6
5/6
6/6
Images


Show more images
1/6
2/6
3/6
4/6
5/6
6/6
Presentation
How the Ocean Lit Up
Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke
2025
Comment l’Océan s’est illuminé (“How the Ocean Lit Up”) offers a fragmented yet sensitive perspective on a pivotal moment in our recent history: the “Great Fire” of June 23, 2030, whose 50th anniversary we commemorate today. This fire destroyed the Bois de Vincennes (Paris, France) and triggered a chain of events with profound ecological, cultural, and psychological repercussions. The anthology revisits the emergence of the mysterious Conscience B—an elusive, luminous entity still not fully understood—as well as the strange behaviors of the mourning starlings, whose songs began to mimic the sound of fire and whose bodies gave rise to peculiar fungi, part-plant, part-bird. These fungi, like the forest’s ashes, were ingested by humans, paving the way for new forms of perception, new sensitivities, and perhaps even a kind of interspecies communication—or a collective hallucination. Rather than offering an exhaustive scientific account of the event, the anthology seeks to explore its intimate, emotional, and symbolic consequences, particularly through the voices of the “children of the fire,” a generation forever marked by loss, sensory transformation, and the emergence of an other kind of consciousness. Through fragments, it aims to capture the moment that forever redefined how we see and inhabit the world since.
Colophon
Publishers: Bétonsalon – center of art and research, Centre des Politiques de la Terre, Cultural Department of Université Paris Cité
Editorial direction: Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke
Editorial coordination: Elena Lespes Muñoz
Texts: Quentin Baghi, Matisse Crespo, Caroline Derniaux, Xavier Dizambourg, Enora Luce, Pauline Mabit, Elena Maj and Priscila Rosas Martínez
Graphic design: mrs-sissy-lyn (Charlotte Carletto & Clara Degay)
2025
French
13,8 x 21 cm
56 pages
10€
This issue was produced as part of the “Grieving-with” writing workshop led by Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke during “The Thick Present”, the author’s research-creation writing residency in collaboration with Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche, the Centre des Politiques de la Terre and the Cultural Department of Université Paris Cité.