Two years on: Has ArtExplorer changed the way people experience art?

When Frédéric Jousset launched ArtExplorer in 2024, his ambition was to bring art beyond the walls of museums and into the heart of coastal communities. Two years later, Sam Fortescue discovers how the world's first floating art gallery has evolved from an ambitious concept into a cultural phenomenon attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. BOAT stepped on board in 2024...

Two years after the world’s first waterborne art gallery was launched, owner Frédéric Jousset is brimming with quiet delight at the project’s success. Not only is his 46.5-metre Perini Navi ArtExplorer the world’s largest sailing catamaran, but she is attracting unprecedented crowds to unusual art-themed events from Rabat to Limassol.

This is the unorthodox story of a tech fortune being put to work in the cultural sphere. Each time ArtExplorer calls at a major port, it kick-starts a 10-day festival of the arts, the yacht itself forming both venue and billboard. 

“We thought we’d be a magnet to attract people because the mast is almost 60 metres tall,” says Jousset in his deliberate, thoughtful manner. Around 300,000 people have visited the festivals. We had 60,000 in Marseille, 80,000 in Tangiers – on average, that’s seven per cent of the total population of the cities we visit. All in just 10 days!”

It is an extraordinary level of engagement, and Jousset tacitly admits that visitors are also motivated by the desire to set foot on a superyacht. “You see from the America’s Cup and Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez that people love these big sailing yachts,” he says. “Most of the time, they cannot come on board. This lack was our opportunity.”

With her 1,000 square metres of floor space, ArtExplorer can welcome around 2,000 people each day. “But we were more ambitious than that,” Jousset continues. “We came up with the idea of a series of pavilions around the boat – a kind of village with concerts and live music. That way, there are multiple entries to the festival.”

The event is dubbed Art Explora Festival and, true to its maritime roots, it is built around a campus of shipping containers, which takes four days to set up. “A local curator in each location has a budget to curate local artists and exhibitions – we make sure there’s a dialogue,” says Jousset. 

“That’s why it is so well received. First, there’s the magic of this big, lavish boat, and, at the same time, there’s a gift in that we make their local art scene more attractive.”

The Maltese capital of Valletta launched this grand experiment in March 2024 with events running from an “open book forum”, where participants explored ideas that resonated within their communities, to interactive performances from traditional music group Etnika. 

There were acrobats, films to raise awareness around climate change and the ocean, think tanks, workshops and more, all curated with the help of Daniel Azzopardi, artistic director of Malta’s National Centre for Creativity.

The yacht itself was at the centre of it all, moored alongside the Xatt Pinto quay near the historical centre. On board, visitors could plunge into a distinctive sensory exhibition showcasing great female figures from the collections of the Louvre in Paris. 

Accompanied by a tailor-made soundtrack, it was beamed onto giant curved screens forming a 16-metre-long tunnel inside the yacht’s superstructure.

On the flybridge above awaited a voyage through sound across the Mediterranean basin, created by IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) and the Centre Pompidou. 

“It is an immersive audio experience that mingles spiritual music, animals, all kinds of screams, people cheering, fans in soccer stadiums… [sounds] that makes you feel like you’re travelling round the Med,” says Jousset.

He remembers the first visitor to come aboard clearly. “It was quite moving, actually. It turned out to be a mum with her nine-year-old son, and that resonated with me. My mother was the chief curator at the Pompidou Centre and took me to exhibitions, which is what infused me with my interest in art.

These are regular people. They are the public we wanted – people who rarely go to museums and are not familiar with contemporary art. I’m sure that if we had the same display in an art centre, they wouldn’t go. But, because it is in a boat, there are masterclasses, and so on, they are tempted by one thing and stay for other reasons.”

It was an intense programme, and as soon as that first festival in Valletta closed, the work began to pack up and sail north to Venice for the next event. 

“It was very complicated at the beginning,” says rotational captain Olivier Gamberini, who joined in April 2024. “Just like any new ship, you can imagine that we faced and are still facing issues on the technical side. We didn’t have time to test the boat and familiarise the crew with everything. It was like rock and roll!”

In Venice, the sailing yacht’s arrival coincided with the Biennale and drew in high-profile exhibitors for ad hoc “Carte Blanche” sessions on the upper deck that could be a concert one day and a panel discussion the next. 

Then it was on to Marseille, each time the programme growing more packed with local film, music and cultural events – often focused on the theme of Mediterranean migration.

“We chose the Med for the first three years because it has a lot of history – a sea that divides but also hyphenates the two continents. The shore-based pavilion questions the hospitality and migrations across the region with photography showing how people interacted before the digital age,” says Jousset. 

“Art and culture are bridges between countries, over borders. We also believe that artists should have their voices amplified, because alongside scientists, activists or politicians, they can convey messages with the weapon of emotion in a very efficient way.”

ArtExplorer’s role shifted during that first summer, after a technical problem in Tangiers forced the team to relocate the Louvre experience to a tent on the quayside. Now the boat provides a 10-minute virtual reality show instead, which enables up to 40 visitors at a time to stroll through the streets of ancient Alexandria, Athens and Venice.

“To have the LED tunnel inside the boat was super cool, to be honest, but in order to get it inside, ready, with the boat respecting the schedule, it was too complicated,” Captain Gamberini says.

“We know the boat much better now. The Art Explora Foundation had no experience of what it is to run a boat and thought it was like a plane that can just go from here to there, without taking into account maintenance or weather. We had to teach them.”

A teething problem with the hydraulic sail controls initially prevented the crew from sailing as much as they could. Nevertheless, Art Explorer has made a respectable 30 per cent of her passages using wind alone. “She really sails a lot, and that’s amazing,” says Jousset, who is himself an experienced regatta sailor. 

“With the Code Zero and main set, she has 1,200 square metres of sail. The hulls are very fine, so she’s pretty efficient – under sail, we’ve reached 17 knots, and she does 10 knots easily. I was really adamant about picking the right crew that likes sailing and trying to push them to optimise the sailing time.”

Art Explorer’s busy schedule makes it complicated, though. For eight months of the year, she is reserved for the Foundation, covering up to six different venues. After Venice, it was Marseille, Málaga, Tangiers and Rabat, before returning to Viareggio to overwinter. In 2025, the stops in Durrës (Albania), Nice, Rijeka, Piraeus and Limassol meant thousands of nautical miles criss-crossing the central and eastern Med.

Once servicing time is taken out, that leaves just two months of the year for private use. “For those two months, it’s available for charter, which creates a revenue stream so I can provide it free of charge for the Foundation,” explains Jousset (the yacht is for charter with Fraser). 

“I personally charter it for two and a half weeks.” At the end of the year, Jousset has provided around half the foundation’s annual €16 million (£13.8m) budget himself, with sponsorship and local funding making up the balance.

“It’s a big effort,” he says candidly, after mentioning the app that has been downloaded 60,000 times as well as two artistic residencies in Paris and Tirana, supporting 60 young artists. “I’m very happy we’ve come from zero to €8 million of external funding, but I want to do more. 

"There’s a sentence in the Talmud that goes something like: ‘If you save one man, you save humanity.’ I believe that there is an enormous value in art which goes way beyond the artistic value of it – a true sense of belonging, self-confidence. There are so many examples of how just one artwork can change a life.”

In 2026, ArtExplorer will break out of the Mediterranean for the first time. In October, she will sail to Le Havre and Saint-Malo in France, before leaving for the Caribbean and Cartagena, Colombia. In late October, she will take the start of the famous Route du Rhum ocean race in St Malo, before turning westward herself for the French Caribbean.

“We want to go to the open seas – the boat is designed to go anywhere in the world,” says Jousset. “The good thing now is we see demand coming from all over: Benin, Senegal, Qatar, Jeddah. Back in the days when we began the journey, we were pitching with PowerPoint. Now we send images of the festivals – the benefit is obvious.

“My only frustration is that [there is only time to visit] six harbours each year. It’s an outdoor festival, so we can do nothing between December and March. If you ask me about my dream, I hope to build another boat further down the line. 

"It would be much cheaper because we could take a former passenger boat or ferry and refurbish it. When we started, we needed a flagship. Now ArtExplorer is known, another, more ordinary boat with extraordinary contents would do.”

First published in the May 2026 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.