Some places contradict their own history on a monumental scale. The Bassins de Lumières are one of them. In Bacalan, in the northern part of Bordeaux, in a building erected by the Todt organisation to shelter Kriegsmarine submarines, you now watch monumental projections of Klimt, Van Gogh, Vermeer and Chagall reflected on the black water of the former pens. The contrast is dizzying. A war machine turned into a digital art cathedral. On paper, this should not exist. On site, it is probably the most unusual cultural venue in the city.
1941-1943: building an unbreakable bunker
Back to the Second World War. Bordeaux, occupied since June 1940, had become a strategic Kriegsmarine base for the Atlantic. German and Italian submarines (including those of the 12th U-boat flotilla) needed a place to resupply, repair and hide from Allied bombing. The Todt organisation, the vast construction arm of the Third Reich, launched in 1941 an ultra-fortified base along the bassins à flot. Construction ran until 1943, mobilising more than 6,000 workers, a large share of them forced labour. The result: 42,000 square metres of floor area, 11 wet and dry pens 110 metres long each, capable of sheltering up to 15 submarines at once, and above all a reinforced concrete roof 5.6 metres thick, engineered to withstand 5-ton bombs. No Allied bomb ever pierced it during the war.
Post-war: a mastodon nobody dares to demolish
At Liberation, the base was abandoned. Demolition came up immediately. Impossible: studies showed that dynamiting 600,000 tons of concrete would cost fortunes and destroy the entire surrounding district. So it stayed there, locked, silent, a huge intruder in the middle of the port. For decades, it served at best as a logistics warehouse for the French Navy, at worst as a squat or an adventure playground for the kids of Bacalan. In the 1990s, the City began to think about what to do with it, without much success. Occasional concerts, film shoots, temporary exhibitions. Nothing really stuck. The place remained massive, oppressive, hard to inhabit.
2020: Culturespaces turns the bunker into a giant screen
New chapter. In 2018, the company Culturespaces (the people behind the Atelier des Lumières in Paris, specialists in immersive multimedia exhibitions) secured a long-term lease with the City of Bordeaux to convert four of the eleven pens into a digital art centre. Titanic work: 90 very high-resolution video projectors, a multi-channel sound system, complete acoustic treatment of the raw walls. Opening in June 2020, in the middle of the Covid crisis. The bet was risky, but visitors flocked in as soon as reopening allowed. In 2024, the venue drew more than a million visitors a year, making it one of the most-visited cultural sites in France. It is also, to date, the world's largest digital art centre by surface area, 12,000 square metres of exhibition space, surpassing the Atelier des Lumières in Paris.
What the experience feels like
The strength of the venue rests on one simple decision: the designers did not try to hide the original architecture. Raw concrete walls stay visible, the pens keep their industrial depth, water still fills the docks (there are 2 metres of it under your feet, you walk on a footbridge). Projections spread across the 20-metre-high walls and double themselves on the black water surface, creating a striking mirror effect. The soundtrack wraps the whole space. Each annual exhibition is dedicated to one or two masters of painting, reinterpreted through an audiovisual staging: Klimt in 2020, Monet-Renoir-Chagall in 2021, Venice in 2023, Van Gogh in 2024. Plan on 1h30 to 2h of visit, 15 euros for adults, 11 euros for children aged 5 to 17.
Practical info
Address: Impasse Brown de Colstoun, 33300 Bordeaux (Bacalan district). Tram B, Bassins à Flot stop, then a 5-minute walk. Open every day except a few public holidays. Extended hours in summer. Online booking strongly recommended, especially on weekends during school holidays. To extend your cultural day, the Cité du Vin is 300 metres away on foot.
