Between 2021 and 2023, Félix Colardelle walked the course of a stream that most of Marseille can no longer see. His resulting book, La Caravelle, documents Les Aygalades, a 17-kilometre watercourse that today slips through the northern districts of the city—buried underground, hidden behind private property, or reduced to a thin thread of water confined in concrete channels and choked by bank-side vegetation.

The Provençal name Aygalades means "abundant waters," and the gap between that etymology and the stream's present condition is the engine of the work. Industrial activity, urbanisation and repeated human intervention have constrained its flow, erased its banks from view and disrupted the ecological balance of its surroundings. Colardelle's project insists that this physical disappearance has a cultural parallel: as the stream faded from the collective imagination and from urban planning, the very conditions of its existence weakened.

The book frames water as a category we habitually split in two. There is the water we dream of—the water of waterfalls, rivers and mountain lakes—and there is domestic water: the water we manage, running through taps, bathrooms and kitchens. These distinctions, the project argues, produce very different relationships with what is ultimately the same element. Les Aygalades belongs fully to neither register, and that limbo is precisely its interest.

Colardelle positions photography as the instrument able to reopen the question. One of the medium's roles, he suggests, is to bring into view what has become invisible. La Caravelle exists between two states—what can be seen and what has disappeared; what remains present and what survives only in memory. By observing and recording the material and mnemonic traces the stream has left behind, the photographs approach the relationships that those living alongside the water maintain with their territory. The result is a portrait of the complex ties between the city, its inhabitants and the natural spaces that remain within it—a form the book itself describes as visual archaeology, exploring memory, use, and the ways a territory is inhabited, transformed and remembered.

The documentary work is not left to speak alone. Philosopher Antoine Devillet contributes a text written from and alongside the photographs, weaving together intuitions, knowledge and encounters. For several years, Devillet has explored the stream with the Gamarres collective, giving his essay a grounded familiarity with the terrain rather than a purely theoretical vantage.

Colardelle, born in 1993, studied photography at ESA Le 75 in Brussels, graduating in 2016. He now lives and works in Marseille, where he recently completed a Master's degree in Comparative Research in Anthropology, Sociology and History at EHESS. His practice sits at the intersection of documentary photography and visual anthropology; he treats photography as an expressive medium for sharing—a means of bringing photographer and subject together and, ultimately, creating a space for encounters between different worlds. His output also extends to press photography, portraiture, live performance and commissioned projects.

He is embedded in Marseille's independent publishing infrastructure from both sides. He co-manages Les Presses Séparées, a collective print workshop in the city, and he co-founded and directs Éditions Charbon, an independent publishing house dedicated to photography and poetry, where he oversees a collection devoted to photographic creation.

The book arrives at a moment when the stream's future is genuinely contested. La Caravelle has undergone extensive development, as if it no longer had a place in the urban landscape, yet recent initiatives have begun to open up new possibilities: the stream has become the subject of different projections, imagined through different uses and addressed to different communities. Whether those projections restore the "abundant waters" of its name or merely manage its remains, Colardelle's record of what persists—in concrete, vegetation and memory—will condition how the next chapter of the stream is argued.