Mobilis in Mobili …. 155 years with Captain Nemo

Captain Nemo on top of the Nautilus (1828-1905) Alphonse Marie Adolphe

On Coherence, Voluntary Exile, and the Silent Resilience of Artistic Work

There are characters you don’t just read.
They settle in.
You encounter them —or they encounter you— and they never quite leave.

Captain Nemo wasn’t a childhood reading. He was a fissure. A signal.
At a time in my life when I still believed adventures were external territories —sea monsters, uncharted horizons, technology waiting to be conquered— he appeared.
Solitary. Lucid. Faithful to his own compass.
Not a hero. Not a villain. Something more unsettling: someone who had chosen to live by his own principles, even if it cost him the world.
Much like Aronnax, I was caught in his orbit, and without intending to, my readings kept returning me to the Nautilus.

Over the years, I came to understand that Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was not a novel about the sea, but about the place from which one chooses to look at the world.
And that Nemo’s motto, Mobilis in mobili —mobility within mobility— wasn’t just a clever play on words.
It was an ethic. A way to move without dissolving. A way to hold on to what is essential while everything else shifts.

Today, 155 years after Verne’s novel was first published, I still think of Nemo.
Because although we live in another era, his figure hasn’t aged.
It has only become more uncomfortable. More necessary. Perhaps even more revealing.

Nemo does not flee.
He withdraws.
Not out of fear, but out of clarity.
And also out of a wound —deep, unhealed— that follows him like a shadow.
He exiles himself from a system he considers unjust, one that —as Verne subtly suggests— caused him irreparable pain.
And from the depths of the sea —with its own rules, its autonomy, its silence— he builds another way of living.

There are moments in Twenty Thousand Leagues when Nemo ceases to be a scientist, an explorer, even a visionary.
He becomes a judge. An executioner.
He sinks ships. He attacks without mercy. He asks for no explanation, and offers none.
And he does so with a force that leaves no room for doubt: he acts from pain.

And although I always managed to separate these two sides of him, I eventually understood that one inevitably feeds the other.
I never followed him into that darkness.
And like Aronnax, my heart was torn between admiration and fear.

But I did recognize the root of his exile.
And more than that, his decision to live in coherence with his vision, his knowledge, and his way of reading the world.
Even if it meant stepping away.
Even if it meant remaining firm at his center while the world spun at full speed.

It is from there —from that clarity, from that resolve— that I recognize myself in him.
In his way of carving out a space from which to observe with depth.
And perhaps, that’s also where my own understanding of creation began.

There is something in that gesture that resonates deeply with artistic practice, especially today.
In a world saturated with visibility, speed, formats, algorithms, and constant exposure, creating from a personal place —with time, with discernment, with vision— is increasingly difficult.
But also more valuable.

Because artistic work —when it does not fully submit to the market, to vanity, or to noise— closely resembles what Nemo does: observe, record, intervene in silence.
Hold a vision.
Build, without asking for permission, a way of being in the world.

To create, then, is not merely to make.
It is to persist.
It is a continuous act of fidelity —often silent— to a way of seeing, listening, interpreting the world.
It is refusing to surrender one’s gaze to automatism.
It is holding on to attention when everything calls for distraction.

To create is to focus when everything around blurs.
It is a gesture of soft, but firm, resistance.
Not to impose a truth, but to safeguard a vision.
To protect it from erosion, from noise, from senseless urgency.

To create is also to ask why we create.
And to have the courage not to answer with slogans, or metrics, or self-help mantras.
But with a way of being. With a way of doing.
With a practice that, like Nemo’s sea, does not shout, but pulls.

It is to find light in the currents, like someone lighting a lamp in the deep decks of a submarine that refuses to surrender.

Today I think that creative resilience is not just about adapting.
It is about resisting without hardening.
About remaining mobile in the mobile.
About continuing to create, even when the ground is unstable, even when the structure holding our work begins to shake.

Like Nemo, the artist sometimes steps aside —not to escape the world— but to understand it better.
And from there, from that chosen depth, they may return something to the world that it does not yet know it needs.