In the verdant valleys of Perche, two hours West from Paris and far from the hustle and bustle of major cities, a subtle dialogue is established between ancient heritage and contemporary creation. The festival Art et Patrimoine en Perche (Art and Heritage in the Perche) returns for its 6th edition with a clear ambition: to make the places speak, by inviting artists with powerful writings, often inhabited by silence, memory, and the connection to matter. Between churches, manors, priories, and mills, the works intrude with restraint or tension into the interstices of the old buildings.
“We want to create sensitive confrontations between the past and the present, between the invisible and the visible,” says artistic director Christine Ollier. Around 10 sites host demanding but accessible proposals, designed in situ, often traversed by the memory of the places.
Among the prominent figures of this edition, Gwennaëlle de Carbonnières takes over the Saint-Martin church in Tourouvre with a dense, almost liturgical installation. A gallery of reversed time, where past and future merge into photographic layers. “Gwennaëlle doesn’t produce images: she collects them,” explains her gallery owner Valérie Cazin. “These are museum images, AI visuals, or even the Metaverse. But that’s only the beginning. The real work begins afterward.” This work is a hand-to-hand combat with the material. Layers, photograms, pigments, alterations, burns, engravings: here, the image twists, consumes itself, and fades.
In a series born from a residency focused on fiction, the artist confronted images generated by artificial intelligence with silver processes: “I video-projected these images onto black and white photo paper. This burned the paper and caused purplish effects, like anticipated wear.” This friction between the virtual and the tangible becomes evident. “For me, these works also speak of obsolescence: that of technologies, images, and perhaps of our tools.” A concern she acknowledges: “The intensive use of AI questions me. I have a more worried than optimistic stance. It’s a new manifestation of human hubris.”
Her works sometimes take the form of engraved tracings, fragments of urban plans, like those of Tony Garnier.” She transforms these images using silver processes, with a large part of accidents,” adds Valérie Cazin. Memory cards, inactive flash codes and pink pigments sometimes come to haunt these works. They are images of anticipated ruin, forms of memory of the future. “Some residents have gone so far as to keep a piece of their demolished building, as was done with the Berlin Wall,” says the artist, referring to her work on disused apartment blocks. The emotional connection to these forgotten places quietly permeates all her work.
In a completely different register, but with the same sensory intensity, Juliette Agnel inhabits the crypt of the church of Colonard-Corubert. The place becomes a cave, a womb, a cosmos. Her work, already seen on the walls of the Clémentine de la Ferronière gallery in recent years, mixes night landscapes, flint, and caves. “This work links several series and several years. It is very mineral, between night landscapes, caves, and flint,” she says. Darkness is a primary material: “It is not the light that guides, it is what we choose to reveal.” The artist evokes her years photographing alone in a prehistoric cave, with a simple lamp: “It is a very intuitive work. I let myself be guided by the place, the sensations, and the unexpected.”
Her images are the result of long exposures, slow gestures, and light painting. “Each image was a surprise,” adds the photographer. The result evokes Jules Verne’s engravings, science fiction plates, or constellations born from the ground. Morocco, a land of personal memory — “My father was born there” — also inhabits this work, which lies somewhere between reality and myth. “The Moroccan deserts attract me deeply. What they provoke in me is both familiar and unknown.”
At the Courboyer manor, in the heart of the Perche Regional Natural Park, artist Mathilde Eudes delivers a very gentle, almost therapeutic offering. Using box frames and silver images enhanced with gold leaf, she explores family ties, absence, and transmission. “Gold symbolizes these ties: family, ancestors, presence or absence,” she explains. Emotion surfaces in this house reinterpreted through the image: “The empty house, without the furniture, became more alive. That’s when I felt the need to make these images.”
Her work is hybrid: photography, drawing, textiles, objects. “Everything comes up at the same time, like a silver image in the developer,” adds Mahtilde Eudes. Each element is handcrafted by him, from the frame to the symbolic key. “The key in my installation is the one my father made for our house. It symbolizes the double, the passage, the connection.” Gold sometimes replaces an element of reality, becoming light, memory, vibration. “This exhibition is a form of reparation, almost psychoanalytic. It brought me immense peace.”
Along this beautiful journey, visitors move from the intimate to the cosmic, from the invisible to the documented. Further on, in the small church of Préaux-du-Perche, artists from the local scene rub shoulders with more established artists. On a regional scale, this festival invents a new form of roaming: it encourages visitors to look up at the buildings, to take their time, and to discover them in a different way.
The Art and Heritage Trail in Perche is on display in Perche until August 3, 2025. All information and locations are available here.
