The title Le bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) refers to the poem of the same name by Arthur Rimbaud, in which he uses the image of a boat to represent a man’s journey through life. In a poetic photographic essay structured like a play in five acts, Martin Essl redraws the outline of a city in transformation and composes an abstract and contemporary map of Paris. »Le bateau ivre leads us on a Parisian tour that shows the eternal return of the same, like a curtain that opens and closes endlessly. As if diluted and transformed, under the influence of variations around cold colors, the Parisian space gradually becomes acqua alta, geographical, social, cultural, and temporal boundaries are dissolved.« (Sarah Sauquet)