What if Sumène Artense had once been an archipelago? This is the fanciful, poetic but rigorously documented hypothesis developed by the Solax collective. In residence in the Sumène Artense region in 2025, Judith Chomel, a micro-archive analyst, and Marine Delcroix, a photographer of lost things, conducted an investigation. Their mission? To find traces of a forgotten maritime past: silhouettes of shipwrecks, snippets of records, fragments of stories.

Based on their encounters with the region and its inhabitants, local archives and sensitive collections, they have compiled a corpus of images and plates as evidence of a vanished maritime region. Their visual and textual vocabulary, nourished by mist, ghostly seaweed and salty winds, transports the viewer into a world suspended between reality and fiction.

This exhibition is the result of their prolific residency, where art becomes a tool for speculation and imagination, daring to retrace our territory in a different way and sowing doubt about the past presence of an ocean on the lands of Cantal.

Beyond the exhibition, this artistic residency includes numerous workshops held from June to October 2025: in local schools, at the Saignes and Ydes nursing home, at the Champagnac Asylum Seekers’ Reception Centre and within the Sumène Artense Media Library network.