Exposition : “Les sentinelles, Figures de l’arbre”

After the flower and the bird, the summer exhibition at Château de Flamanville is dedicated to the tree. While the dahlia conservatory garden and the corbeautière, both present in the park, had inspired previous exhibitions, it is the tree, the main character of the Château?s surroundings, that feeds this proposal. Here, the familiar, good-natured chestnut stands alongside the haughty silhouette of the beech, at the top of which nests the rook. In the sparse alleyway, one bends amiably towards the visitor, while further on, where heady cawing echoes, the other seems to stand guard for its feathered congeners. Inspired by these dual figures, the exhibition offers an incursion into the imaginary world of the tree.
A personified figure, once feminine in Greek and Latin antiquity, masculine in modern Latin societies, the tree is the one who, sometimes stoic, sometimes vengeful, gathers and protects, traps and punishes. Because it escapes our understanding and literally surpasses us, because it precedes us and outlives us, the tree is the receptacle of our imaginations, our hopes and our fears.
Yasuyuki Takagi photographs the tree of childhood, both our own and that of the world, on the island of Yakushima and its primeval forest. Enter its thicket, and you end up with Loren Capelli?s drawing of the great tree in whose shade the child measures his own growth and climbs ever higher. A voice is heard, telling us the story of a tree uprooted in Gap, a coin from ancient Rome and the rings of Saturn, in a video by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond that links roots and sky, the depths of the earth and the cosmos, with the pine tree in the family garden as an intercessor. Uprooted, too, is the tree we see floating at sea in Salomé Jashi?s film, strapped to a boat and moving away from the village around it to a billionaire?s park in Georgia. Teo Becher?s Soignes Forest tree, with its intertwined trunk, stump and branches, links the ancient past of a primary forest in Northern Europe with contemporary human exploitation and its slag. For Riitta Päiväläinen, the stretching, wide-open tree is home to strange ghosts, reminiscent of the rags with which votive trees once covered themselves. In Poland, reveals Natalia Romik, the trunk of the Josef oak became a refuge during the Second World War for two Jewish brothers trying to escape execution.
In the grounds of the Château, a series of photographs by Mélanie Dornier is dedicated to wish trees.
Firmly rooted in a Pacific rainforest or uprooted from a Georgian village square, a tender companion for a child or a refuge for the persecuted during the war, the tree here stands sentinel, on the watch. Permeable to everything from celestial water to terrestrial madness, to our fantasies of eternity and our anguish of finitude, the tree is a landmark: who knows, perhaps it will know what to do with this thing, existence?

EXHIBITION DESIGNED BY CENTER PHOTOGRAPHIQUE ROUEN NORMANDIE

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