Barthélémy Toguo, balade aquatique

The article

In its architecture special issue no. 31 (April-May 2025), IDEAT devotes a page of its “News expo” section to 20 000 lieues sous les mers : le voyage de Barthélémy Toguo. Sabrina Silamo describes how the artist brings together the water of the rivers of Cameroon, his native country, and that of the Moselle, turning the gallery into a giant aquarium.

The article opens with Road to Exile, a boat laden with bundles wrapped in African fabrics and set on a bed of bottles, which the journalist reads as an evocation of the fate of migrants. She recalls that the exhibition grew out of Jules Verne's novel, whose engravings Nathan Chiche remembers discovering as a child, then describes Jean Prouvé's school filled with fish, some in bronze, amphorae and ceramics, and the glass bays covered in droplets that turn the windows into portholes.

Finally, the text dwells on Toguo blue, developed in 2017 by the Manufacture de Sèvres for the fresco of 200 stoneware tiles at Château-Rouge metro station in Paris, and on the artist's commitment as patron of the association What Water, which fights unequal access to drinking water in Central Africa. The journalist concludes on an odyssey both poetic and political, between Vantoux and Cameroon.