Exhibitions text (English):

"As for myself' before I read Diolé’s books, I did not imagine that limitlessness could be attained so easily. It suffices to dream of pure depth which needs no measuring, to exist. But then, we ask, why did Diolé, who is a psychologist as well as an ontologist of under-seas human life, go into the desert? As a result of what cruel dialectics did he decide to leave limitless water for infinite sand? Diolé answers these questions as a poet would. He knows that each new contact with the cosmos renews our inner being, and that every new cosmos is open to us when we have freed ourselves from the ties of a former sensitivity. At the beginning of his book (loc. cit., p. 12), Diolé tells us that he had wanted to “terminate in the desert the magical operation that, in deep water, allows the diver to loosen the ordinary ties of time and space and make life resemble an obscure, inner poem.” At the end of his book, Diolé concludes (p. 178) that “to go down into the water, or to wander in the desert, is to change space,” and by changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. “Neither in the desert nor on the bottom of the sea does one’s spirit remain sealed and indivisible.” This change of concrete space can no longer be a mere mental operation that could be compared with consciousness of geometrical relativity. For we do not change place, we change our nature.

But since these problems of the fusion of being in highly qualitative, concrete space are interesting for a phenomenology of the imagination—for one has to imagine very actively to experience new space—let us examine the hold that fundamental images have on this author. While in the desert, Diolé does not detach himself from the ocean and, in fact, desert space, far from contradicting deep-sea space, is expressed in Diolé’s dreams in terms of water. Here we have a veritable drama of the material imagination born of the conflict of two such hostile elements as arid desert sand and water assured of its mass, without any compromise with pastiness or mud. Indeed, this passage of Diolé’s shows such sincerity of imagination that I have left it uncut (loc. cit., p. 118) “I once wrote that a man who was familiar with the deep sea could never be like other men again. Such moments as this (in the midst of the desert) prove my statement. Because I realize that, as I walked along, my mind filled the desert landscape with water! In my imagination I flooded the space around me while walking through it. I lived in a sort of invented immersion in which I moved about in the heart of a fluid, luminous, beneficent, dense matter, which was sea water, or rather the memory of sea water. This artifice sufficed to humanize for me a world that was dishearteningly dry, reconciling me with its rocks, its silence, its solitude, its sheet of sun gold hanging from the sky. Even my weariness was lessened by it. I dreamed that my bodily weight reposed on this imaginary water. “I realize that this is not the first time that unconsciously, I have had recourse to this psychological defence. The silence and the slow progress I made in the Sahara awakened my memories of diving. My inner images were bathed then in a sort of gentleness, and in the passage thus reflected by dream, water appeared quite naturally. As I walked along, I bore within me gleaming reflections, and a translucent density, which were none other than memories of the deep sea.”

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                         from "THE POETICS OF SPACE" by  Gaston Bachelard 1957