Bath of light (Guadeloupe, Port-Louis)

On Guadeloupe's beaches, manchineel trees offer much more than just a patch of shade: they mark the boundary between the domestic space of the sand and the shifting freedom of the sea. Poisonous trees whose sap burns the skin, they are paradoxically the most protective against the heat of the sun, which makes them omnipresent—but also marked with a regulatory red dot, a reminder of their danger.

In Port-Louis, the shoreline becomes a place of gentle transition every evening. We enter the water as if in an informal ritual of decompression, an extension of the body into the landscape. Here, the sea is not a postcard setting: it is a lived-in, daily, restorative space , both accessible and full of memory.

In this intimate relationship with water, we find another way of inhabiting: not in possession, but in relation. The bodies slide, become still, and move on. It is not a spectacular scene. It is the slow certainty of being in one's place .