19 MAY TO 19 SEPTEMBER 2021

Living the place: BENOIT FOUGEIROL

LIVING THE PLACE,
BENOÎT FOUGEIROL, BOOK OF THE PLANTS (2020), CHARTREUSE DU LIGET
With the support of Conseil départemental d’Indre-et-Loire

Gathered together by Anne-Laure Chamboissier, artistic curator, about ten artists were invited to live in places* in Touraine from spring to autumn 2021 following a creative residency. The theme "Living in the place" takes on its full meaning at a time when everyone is reviewing their lifestyles and the spaces that surround them. The artists renterrogate what constitutes these places, whether through the prism of their history, their architecture or their function. These works draw a new and sensitive cartography of the territory through their singular view of these places.

"Curiously, no one was shocked by the implausibility of suddenly raising the first weed to the rank of an artistic motif", Aloïs Riegl. For the Carthusian monks, "living" meant first of all appropriating a territory, delimiting it and managing it so that it would become their living space, capable of providing the isolation necessary to devote themselves to their faith but also of being able to meet the subsistence needs of a monastic establishment. The carthusian monastory is no exception to the rule and its location in a clearing in the forest of Loches brings together the qualities essential to the creation of the "Carthusian Desert". From the horizon of the forest to the floral ornamentation of the manuscripts illuminated by the copyist monks, botany is a thread that links the territory to knowledge and its transmission, materialised in the books of the Liget library, now preserved in Loches. From this collection, the Book of Plants will serve as a guide to observe the site, reawakening its history and revealing through photography a repertoire of forms between nature, architecture and writing, in order to question its analogies and discrepancies.

*Castle of Azay Le Rideau, Chartreuse du Liget- Chemillé-sur-Indrois, Castle of Montrésor, Collegiale of Bueil-en-Touraine, Castle of Gizeux, Castle of Valmer-Chançay, Castle of Champchevrier - Cléré Les Pins, Priory of St Cosme- House of Ronsard- La Riche, Museum of Balzac- Castle of Saché, La Deviniere- House of Rabelais- Seuilly, Domaine de Candé-Monts, Eco Museum of the Véron.

► PDF Download the exhibition’s booklet

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