Ann Dingli (AD): Looking through your entire portfolio – the sea has been your subject for a long time. More than a cosmological inquiry, yours seems to be a personal one; a reckoning of self-actuality or some kind of geographically-tethered existentialism. It's a work about deciphering your place in a metaphysical world as much as in a physical one. Is this right?

 

Cyril Sancereau (CS): Yes, that's correct. My work with the sea has never been a detached contemplation or a quest for the universal sublime. It's a deeply personal investigation, but personal doesn't mean private or solely introspective.

 

Living in Malta for over ten years has made this attention to the sea inevitable. On an island, the sea is not a landscape you look at from the shore. It's everywhere, it surrounds, it defines the limits. Insularity is not a metaphor: it's a physical condition that requires constant adjustment. You can't ignore it or turn away from it.

 

This geographical condition resonates with other forms of insularity I've experienced: spaces where presence must be continuously negotiated, where you must constantly read the signs, sense the limits, adjust your position. As a gay man living on a Mediterranean island that has become a point of migratory passage, the negotiation of space is not abstract for me. It's daily.

It's this necessity to negotiate space that has oriented my attention toward the sea: it perfectly embodies this impossibility of being fixed, this obligation to inhabit what never stays in place. In Adrift, I film just below the water's surface, the camera attached to my body. All solid reference points disappear. There's no longer a stable up or down, only the movement of currents, refractions of light, drift. It's exactly the experience of navigating spaces where no anchoring is guaranteed.

 

So yes, it is a "reckoning of self-actuality," as you put it. But it's also political: for those whose presence in space is never fully secure, whether they're migrants, queers, or simply islanders, instability is not a philosophical abstraction. It's a daily condition to inhabit.

 

My work proposes that this condition can be inhabited, not just endured. That fragility is not necessarily a threat. 

AD: In your statement about "inhabiting impermanence", you say that your work "begins where certainty ends," and that you "explore what it means to accept impermanence". Is acceptance not a certainty? Or, does acceptance not require a certainty of self in order to have the right context for manifestation? The sea can change only because it exists – because it has been given a place within an ecosystem that allows it to ceaselessly move. Without that grant, it couldn't exist, neither would the 'change' it represents. Can there really be acceptance without some grounding of certainty, without reaching some immutable understanding of context/truth?

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CS: You raise a classic paradox: isn't acceptance itself a form of certainty? It's a philosophically valid objection, and I've considered it extensively.

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My answer is that the acceptance of impermanence is not a fixed state that one would reach once and for all. It's a continuous process, a daily practice. You don't accept instability once and then be at peace. You negotiate with it at every moment. Each day, each perception, each movement in space requires a new adjustment.

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Your question assumes that first there must be a stable foundation, a 'certainty of self', to then manage movement. But I propose the opposite: that identity is constituted within movement, not before it.

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When I film with the camera attached to my wrist in Liminal, I can't 'decide' to stabilize the horizon. My body floats, oscillates with the waves, constantly adjusts its balance to avoid sinking. This adjustment is perception. There isn't first a stable body that then perceives. The body that perceives is already negotiating, adjusting, trembling.

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Your analogy with the sea is accurate: the sea can only change because it exists, because it has a place in an ecosystem. But this "place" is not fixed. It is itself constantly redefined by tides, currents, winds, temperatures. The sea's existence is not a stable certainty that would then allow change. Its existence is change.

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43°NE / 90°E makes this visible: two fixed cameras record the sea's surface in precise directions for hours. The compressed sequences reveal variations in light, rhythms invisible to the naked eye. The sea reveals itself as pure transformation. What seems stable, a water surface filmed from a fixed point, is in reality constant flux.

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The same applies to identity. It's not that first there's a stable 'self' that then accepts impermanence. The 'self' is constituted in the very practice of adjustment. In Liminal, this trembling is not a flaw to correct. It's the recording of a body constantly negotiating its balance. The horizon never fixes because the body that perceives never fixes.
So: no, there's no need for an 'immutable understanding of context' or a prior 'certainty of self'. What remains, and perhaps this is the only "certainty", is the capacity to perceive, to be present, to adjust. Not a fixed identity, but sustained attention. It's a continuous presence, not a conclusion. 

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AD: You talk about the inevitability of change. In your description, and indeed your work, that relates to the sea. Humanity is arguably different. One of the greatest questions of our existence is whether people can truly change or not – not merely on a personal level, but on a societal one as well. You bring up themes of insularity and influence, specifically in relation to island life. Do these themes ever really change? Or do they just adopt different guises? Quite like the sea on different days of the year – sometimes it's rough and angry, others it's mild, unassuming. It is still always changing. In short – is change real, or is it different versions of the same thing over and over again?

 

CS: Your question asks me to choose: is change 'real' or just 'variations of the same'? But I think this is a false opposition, and it's precisely this false opposition that my work seeks to displace.

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The sea constantly changes but remains recognizable as 'the sea'. Is this real change or just variations? Both, simultaneously. Change is not linear, passing from state A to state B definitively different and never returning. It's cyclical, spiral. We return, but transformed.
The sea in Malta in January is never the sea in August. Same place, same geographical coordinates, but different water, different light, different air temperature that changes how my body floats. And especially: the body that perceives it has aged six months, lived other things, sees differently. Is it 'the same sea'? Yes and no.

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It's like an ancient building that ages and is restored over centuries: at some point, almost all the materials have been replaced. Is it still the same building? Depending on the framework we choose, social identity or physical materiality, both answers are valid. The question is not 'which is true' but 'which perspective is productive for understanding what interests us'.

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In Liminal, the video loop repeats: same horizon, again and again. But as I write: "The same horizon returns but never identical, because the one who looks has changed." Change is not only in the observed object. It's in the perceptual relationship between subject and world.
Fold explores this same question differently: a photographed fragment of sea becomes a dense tactile field, without horizon or depth. Water transforms into a vibrating membrane between visibility and touch. It's still the sea, but rendered unrecognizable, abstract. Is this a change or a revelation of what was already there? Both. Photography doesn't change the sea, it changes our relationship to it.

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For humanity and the social structures you mention, yes, certain patterns persist: power, exclusion, negotiation of space. Themes of insularity and influence don't magically disappear. But the individuals who inhabit them change in their capacity to perceive them, name them, respond to them. It's not a visible and sudden revolution. It's a subtle but real transformation of the relationship.

Your question suggests we must choose between 'real change' and 'repetition'. But it's precisely this ambiguity that must be inhabited, and that my work explores. I don't seek to resolve the paradox, I seek to create spaces where this ambiguity can be lived, felt bodily.
Change is real and its variations on persisting structures. It's not a contradiction to resolve. It's a tension to inhabit. 

AD: What brought you to Malta and what made you stay? How has it changed the way you work – if it has?

 

CS: I first came to Malta twenty years ago. At the time, I was exhausted and broke. A friend offered me his house in Gozo for a few weeks of rest. I fell in love with the landscape. I walked it in every direction, photographed it obsessively. My work was then very connected to walking artists, to this idea of traversing a territory to understand it.

 

I returned regularly for several years. Around 2013, the debate over gay marriage in France had become unbearable. My partner and I felt it was time to leave. We moved here in 2015. What was meant to be temporary became permanent.

 

What made me stay is a very strong attachment to this landscape and its population. Malta has historically been constituted by successive waves of migration and continues to define itself this way. I feel at home here, perhaps precisely because the island's identity itself is made of displacements and multiple anchorings.

 

On an island of this size, you can develop a physical, almost daily relationship with the geography. This isn't possible with a continent, too vast, too diffuse. The island has a human scale.

 

Living on an island means always being conscious of limits. You know where the land stops, where the sea begins. There's no stable beyond to turn toward, no firm ground on the horizon. Only this expanse that constantly changes. This acute awareness, you can never forget it, even temporarily, has profoundly structured my work. It's perhaps here that I've been able to truly deepen this question of impermanence, of the impossibility of being fixed.

 

Before settling in Malta, I had training in architecture then in arts. My attention was already shifting from measurable space toward elusive landscape, from structure toward flux, from what is built toward what undoes itself. But living here permanently has accelerated and concentrated this shift. The sea is no longer an optional subject. It has become a condition of existence, impossible to ignore.

 

Malta is also, geographically, a place of passage. The island is never only a point of arrival. It's always also a potential place of departure, of waiting, of in-between. This dimension of the provisional that endures, of precarious anchoring, it informs my work even if I don't thematize it directly.

 

In ten years of permanent life here, my work has become inseparable from this place. All my recent works are made here, with this specific Mediterranean sea, in this particular relationship to insularity. Insularity is not a backdrop. It's a condition that produces a certain type of perception, of constant adjustment. 

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AD: You talk about fragility and your efforts to capture it, yet your images are robust, full of contrast and tonal strength. Can you comment on this interplay?

 

CS: This paradox is intentional and constitutive of my work. The fragility I speak of is not visual. It's existential. Speaking of precarity, of constant negotiation of space, of vulnerability as a lived condition, this requires images that have presence, intensity. If my images were visually timid or evanescent, we would miss the experience they seek to open.

 

I work almost exclusively in black and white for this reason. Black and white strips the image bare: light, shadow, texture, form. It refuses to situate geographically or temporally. Without colour, the sea could be anywhere, anytime. The strong contrast, between points of light and deep black in Surface of the Sea, for example, creates the space where attention can unfold, where the experience of instability can take place. This formal concentration doesn't weaken the proposition. It carries it.

 

There's also a political dimension to this choice. The lived fragility, by migrants negotiating borders, by those whose presence in space is never guaranteed, is not something decorative. It's a condition that demands immense strength to inhabit.

 

Adrift illustrates this: filmed underwater, the body in complete drift, without solid reference points. It's visually intense. The refractions of light, the movements of currents create powerful forms. But what we see is the experience of total vulnerability, of the absence of ground beneath one's feet. The visual strength carries this vulnerability, it doesn't mask it.

 

My images try to carry this tension: fragility as a strong condition, not as weakness. In Contour, the insular form that appears and disappears in the reflection of a puddle exists "between visibility and dissolution, sustained by barely perceptible forces: wind, light, the wavering attention of the viewer". It's fragile, yes, but this fragility demands sustained, intense attention. It's not passive. You must watch carefully to see the form emerge, then accept that it disappears. It's an exercise in presence, not passivity.

 

So to answer directly: my images are formally robust because I speak of existential fragility. This visual strength is necessary for the experience of instability to be not only conceptual but lived, felt bodily by the viewer. The formal robustness serves to reveal fragility, not to deny it.