Exposition “NOUS, Sorcière & Sauvage”
Following the cultural season “NOUS, sorcière et sauvage”, come and discover the exhibition devoted to it: an original experience bringing contemporary art, literature and heritage into dialogue.
About this event
The wild man and the witch are two major figures in the collective imagination that art, literature and cinema have continually revisited. Both appear in great myths, with the forest as their shared birthplace. Through transformations upon transformations, they have inspired fear and fantasy, fascination and revulsion throughout history. In their own ways, they are symbols—and victims—of the old opposition between culture and nature that still shapes our relationship with the world today. Like a fairy tale or medieval literature, the exhibition invites visitors to cross the edge of the woods. In an immersive, enchanting journey dotted with stories and historical archives, the 130 works on display encourage us to understand how these unsettling, “repellent” figures have become reconciliatory figures and witnesses to humanity’s need to rewild and re-enchant itself.
General curatorship: Céline du Chéné, producer at France Culture, including the documentary series Sorcières (2018), and author of the book Les sorcières, une histoire de femmes, (éditions France Culture - Michel Lafon, 2019).
Associate curator: Laure Pabot, Bibliothèque départementale.
Artists: Katia Bourdarel, Alexa Brunet, Odonchimeg Davaadorj, Edi Dubien, Christelle Enault, Charles Fréger, Delphine Jacquot, Sophie Lécuyer, Julien Salaud, Anaïs Tondeur.
Collections: Museum d’Histoire naturelle de Marseille, Museum d’Histoire naturelle d’Aix-en-Provence, Musée des Arts décoratifs (Paris).
Exhibition design: Scénografia’ / Lighting and video design: Fearless
Soundtrack: Laurent Paulré.
The exhibition route
The hall: the call of the forest The hall beckons visitors toward the forest. The silhouettes of Basque witches burned for their freedom and photographer Charles Fréger’s half-man, half-beast archetypes plunge visitors straight into the world of the witch and the wild man. In the distance, Julien Salaud’s Cerfaure, a hybrid deer-man, invites us to cross the forest’s edge and lose our bearings.
The gallery: from the dark forest where imaginations dance to the necessary re-enchantment of the contemporary world In the “forest gallery”, we enter the world of night, which reveals the witch’s attributes: brooms, ravens, white ladies. The path from clearing to clearing sheds light on what may have brought these two creatures together and led to their condemnation: transformation, the impossibility of categorization, ties to the devil, and fantasy. Edi Dubien’s moving drawings pay tribute to the figure of the wild child, whose stories haunted Europe from the Renaissance through the 19th century.
At the end of the path: light. Odonchimeg Davaadorj’s poetic works, in which humans, animals and plants intertwine, evoke the necessary reconnection between living beings and the fragility of life. Anaïs Tondeur’s photographs shift our perspective and invite us to discover the world through a bee’s eyes. In a time of ecological crisis that raises the question of the planet’s survival, shouldn’t we become wild and witch-like again?
