La mémoire des pierres

"La mémoire des pierres"

from Friday, June 21, 2024 to Sunday, November 3, 2024

Festival Photo La Gacilly (Morbihan, France)

Discovering Morbihan's sensitive rural heritage



Take a break from the Morbihan's many charming tourist attractions, and take a side trip to the Breton moors, coastal paths and remote hamlets. You'll discover little-known treasures, built, sculpted and shaped in times immemorial, testifying to the diversity of activities carried out in the past, but also the seeds of a culture bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Here, a chapel with jagged tympanums; further down, a washhouse designed in hollows; there, a ruined manor house or an imposing granite calvary; further on, a megalithic site with endless alignments that so dazzled Stendhal: “This ancient procession of stones benefits from the emotion given by the proximity of a dark sea...”.

Over the space of a winter, from Locuan to Locmaria, from l'île d'Arz to Guehenno, visual artist Sophie Zénon criss-crossed the Morbihan region, accompanied by Diego Mens, heritage curator at the Conseil départemental, the initiator of this new photographic commission. What struck her? “The interweaving of granite and landscape, and vegetation in particular. It gives off an atmosphere that is sometimes serene, sometimes melancholy, conducive to a form of introspection and meditation.

This is the reason for the radical approach to photography adopted by Sophie Zénon, who tirelessly experiments with the photographic medium to create organic, vibrant and poetic works. Here, Sophie Zénon has opted for a frontal approach and general shots. She has used an ancient technique, orotone, a photographic print on a silver gelatin glass plate made by Caroline Chik, to which she has applied gold gilding with a brush. And the viewer discovers a precious, delicate, fragile, timeless object, in shades of black and tan, as if echoing these sacred monuments, dear to the hearts of their inhabitants.

In the plant labyrinth at La Gacilly, the photographs, printed in large format on brushed aluminum, shimmer and play with light and shadow, creating a surprising effect of depth.