A 13th-century château-turned-luxury hotel in a 2,500-acre idyllic landscape of forests, meadows and seven lakes might be an unlikely site for contemporary art shows that speak to eco-urgency. But for the past five years there have been annual environment-focused exhibitions at Domaine des Etangs, Garance Primat’s family estate in Massignac, France — which is also a site for biodiversity research.
Primat is a collector and philanthropist who began commissioning monumental site-specific work on her property (as part of her collection of over 1,000 works), with an eye towards art as a mirror of our human and non-human surroundings. The latest exhibition, Primordial Waters, curated by Claudia Paetzold, reimagines water as the source for these reflections, opening at a time when, ironically, the atmosphere was heavy with the promise of rain.
In a new commission, “For Floating Bells and Amplified Lake (where centenary mussels dwell)”, sound artist Tomoko Sauvage directs six performers shoulders-deep in one of the lakes. Using mallets to tap and sound standing bells (or singing bowls), they create unstructured, clanging sounds. Sauvage was inspired by the jal tarang, an old Indian percussive arrangement of ceramic bowls, which modulate pitch based on the level of water.
Hydrophones were installed underneath the lake, which is apparently populated with hundred-year-old freshwater mussels. Donning silent disco headphones, I could barely make out the augmented underwater sounds. In this fluid scenography, something was amiss. I kept wondering what the performers were hearing and feeling. Were they following the tiny movements of mussels impacted by the bells’ vibrations as sonic cues?
At times the audio translated into a sensuous trickling or scooping of water, like being let in to an intimate space. But largely, it bled into the performative gonglike echoes, bird chatter and the effects of a low-lying wind like static electricity, with sonic textures that felt muffled, viscous and bubbly.
The performance sparked questions on the significance of open-air interventions as a form of public art, especially when situated in a postcard-perfect, bucolic landscape that will probably only be accessible to a privileged few. Sauvage’s half-hour performance ended with drizzle, the prelude to a rainstorm: as Sauvage put it, the real performance was enacted by the natural environment.
Inside the property’s gallery space, La Laiterie, are two of Pamela Rosenkranz’s 2021 “Alien Blue Window” lightboxes, the LED-blue turning a deeper hue as the natural light fades. These are in conversation with — and in opposition to — Yves Klein’s “182 Le Monochrome” (1961), a historic textural work in his particular blue, discreetly placed behind a passageway wall. In “Fantomas” (2023), five suspended metallic chains by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, each connecting cloudlike forms, delicately splice the air, barely perceptible. With gaps at the edges, they read like broken signs or ambiguous symbols.
In contrast, a preponderance of works by Olafur Eliasson felt weighty. A black box showcases Eliasson’s murky light and shadow-play in “The Casting of Soon After Now” (2021), a complex projection comprising light, glass and lenses attached to motors and mirrors. But the artist’s double helix-shaped “Antireductionist Mirror Spiral” (2021), a funhouse object multiplying our reflections in stainless steel spheres, and “Sound System Versus Void Sequence” (2021), a constellation of elliptical cutouts on translucent coloured glass panes on driftwood, occupy a more decorative role.
As did the neatness of the puddle-like water kept in place with a hydrophobic coat atop Nina Canell’s floor sculpture “Days of Inertia” (2023). These sculptural slabs were sourced from rock debris due to the Rochechouart meteorite landing in the area 260mn years ago; one slab, with a mossy overgrowth, stood out.
The most sensorial and site-responsive work in this show was not visual. When the tide shifted that evening, we were confronted with a strong herbal scent — moist, fermented and earthy — sweeping through the gallery space. It came from diffuser devices in the gallery with which Sissel Tolaas’s “N-E-W-S” (2023) reproduces the scent of the Domaine’s oldest lake from molecular data taken from cardinal points (north, east, west and south).
“I’m making an image of invisible particles by reducing smell into individual molecules,” Tolaas tells me. “It’s like breaking a picture into pixels. Twice a day, during high and low tide in the Atlantic, I hack the air conditioning system by programming the air flow to emit the complex smell of the ocean.” Since scent is stronger in a high wind, we were experiencing the results of the water’s movement picked up by wind sensors in the lake, which then feed information into a microcomputer that programmes the smells inside the gallery — again, it seemed that the weather was on our side.
The notion of water as an originary and transformative force that rises and recedes came through strongly here. It was a deep-smelling encounter akin to avant-garde American composer Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening practices, which bring attention to our acoustic environment — from perceived to inaudible and remembered sound — as a field of focus. Like listening to the act of listening, this was about smelling as a conscious act.
“It’s time to look into communication systems beyond semantic, semiotic and visual codes. Chemical compounds tell us something,” Tolaas says. “Like what does it mean to be in context of others, to be part of an interconnected network?”
This resonates with a line by Roni Horn in “Saying Water” (2007), an audio piece installed in a bushy enclave by the property’s entrance: “Sometimes, when I look at the river, I can see into it slightly, not very far, not more than an inch or too — but it gives a feeling that the water is occupied, almost to the exact volume of the river, with something other than water, perhaps another water.”
Horn leaves the listener with a sense of the opaque inscrutability of water. A very different perspective will be taken by Caroline Corbasson, who, inspired by the sea as an ancient astronomical mirror, will be creating a work, “Mirror Lakes” (2023), for the winter solstice, guiding an observation of the stars from the lake.
Other works will be added at various points of this nine-month-long exhibition, including Jean-Marie Appriou’s eerie “Swamp-Fairy” (2022), akin to a prehistoric dragonfly, also the symbol of Primat’s collection. His massive sculpture will be perched outside, next to a swampy area and above the main breeding ground of dragonflies, thousands of which are preserved at Domaine.
Nearby are other impressively mounted sculptures such as Tomás Saraceno’s utopic “Cloud Cities: du sol au soleil” (2022), sited above the edge of the Rochechouart crater, now filled with water. A miniature version of this work in the gallery paled in comparison. I left the exhibition thinking that in the sheer scale of our surroundings, art could only serve as a meagre illumination of the boundlessness and scarcity in our ecological moment.
To March 22, 2024, aubergeresorts.com/domainedesetangs
