Entropic Island
Book designed and edited by Noé Cotter
Soft Cover ink jet, Swiss binding
31X 42,5 cm / 98 pages
" This project started as I found myself stuck at my family house during the lockdown.
The house is located in the country side, on the north shore of lake Neuchâtel, just where the Areuse, the local river reaches the lake.
Since a year now I practice a sport called Free Dive. It’s a form of apnea. You try to stay under water as long as you can and sometimes as deep as you can.
But since then, this practice became more than a sport to me. It has become a quest for meaning.
Because after holding your breath for five minutes with an empty mind, without a sound or voice reaching your mind, it is a kind of near-death experience.
This brings you to the fundamental questions: what is life? Where do I come from? Why is this stone ten thousand times older than me? What the hell am I doing ?
Obviously, nobody has answers. So I went out to look for them…"
" The book is symbolically split in three parts, the first one is the water part, the diving part.
It takes place in the lake but also in the depth of the canyon.
The middle part concerns the objects that I collected, these are my treasures. They are carrying with them the trace of the evolution, of time.
And the last part, as the first mammal leaving the water to live on lands, we arrive on the shore of the river bank.
The exploration finishes in the caves (Cotencher’s caves), a place where the the first humans once lived… "
Pilotis
Diaporama photo : 6 min 20 sec
Texte : Marco Poloni et Noé Cotter
Voix Off : Noé Cotter
Pilotis is a short film based on photographs, which takes us into the drifts of Noé Cotter under the waters of Lake Neuchâtel: meditation space, escape space, the practice of apnea is for him a way to escape from everyday life. From this quest was born a corpus of images where foreign bodies and lacustrine remains mingle, between history and poetry. The playground of this short film is the palafittique site of Cortaillod/Les Esserts. Almost 3,000 years old, it is now partially submerged and covers an area of 15,000 m2. In his story, Noé Cotter re-examines myths and questions the porosity of civilizations and traditions over time.
