Moët-Hennessy Collection, 2020
Photographed between Epernay and Reims, France, during the summer of 2020 in the context of an art-residency / private commission by Moeët-Hennessy, this collection of images is an improvised poetic exploration of the underground landscape of the Moët-Hennessy cellars, the Ruinart and Veuve Clicquot chalk pits - which house and preserve champagne - and, echoing the landscape on their surface.
Vineyards in the south of Epernay, buildings such as the salons of the Maison Moët, its gardens, the Abbey of Saint-Pierre d'Hautvillers which houses the tomb of Dom Pérignon, a pioneer in the manufacture of champagne in the 18th century, the remains of chalk quarries south of Hautvillers, where the raw material look like the excavated surfaces of the chalk pits or in the surrounding forest (especially cellar entrances hidden by vegetation).
Looking for analogies between these two worlds, in this back and forth between the surface and the subsoil, organic worlds of the chalk geology, of the forest and the vineyards on the surface, one guesses that the landscape there functions as a language. If some images linger on the monochrome and very sculptural world of chalk and cellars, on their concave and convex volumes, their hollowed and engraved surfaces, others question this play between the surface and the subsoil and the places of transition between these two worlds made of passages, doors and paths.
The landscape underground is a chalk world of tortured textures, of uneven surfaces, cut, corrected, dug, marked by the tools of its own creation, and by the passages of time. It is monochromatic, and the play of shadow and light takes over the color’s meaning. The crayeres, like the cellars, are tirelessly illuminated by a primary yellow light from sodium lamps, so yellow that no photographic artifice, whether at the shooting or post-production stage, can correct it. This characteristic light resists all attempts at correction. (Also, the yellow filter, in black and white photography, has the virtue of revealing contrasts). The contrasting landscape of the vineyards of Epernay in the summer also lends itself to a very graphic approach to reveal its complex surfaces. I decide to use black and white, to produce photographs that are direct enough, without blurring, to organically document these spaces and their dialogues frontally and objectively.
All these spaces are places of conservation, places of long time. The chalk, which makes the soil, is a material that keeps the marks of time, which was extracted from the surface to dig and build, seems to tirelessly reveal a memory, a visible history.
This landscape is made of strata, whose history is the most obvious. The topology of this ancient territory bears witness to this. Graffiti, engraved in chalk, sometimes two centuries old, sometimes very recent, are omnipresent, on the surface as well as in the basement (on the soft - and therefore irresistible - walls of the cellars and chalk pits, on the surface of the millions of bottles kept there to age, on the walls and pews of the Hautvillers church,...).
The inhabitants of these places, workers in the conservation and maturation of Champagne, as well as day visitors leave their mark, a small drawing, a fantasy, more often just their own name or that of their children. The interminable corridors of the cellars bear the names of the former historical workers of the basement.
Everyone seems to want to make it their own.
Return to project
Vineyards in the south of Epernay, buildings such as the salons of the Maison Moët, its gardens, the Abbey of Saint-Pierre d'Hautvillers which houses the tomb of Dom Pérignon, a pioneer in the manufacture of champagne in the 18th century, the remains of chalk quarries south of Hautvillers, where the raw material look like the excavated surfaces of the chalk pits or in the surrounding forest (especially cellar entrances hidden by vegetation).
Looking for analogies between these two worlds, in this back and forth between the surface and the subsoil, organic worlds of the chalk geology, of the forest and the vineyards on the surface, one guesses that the landscape there functions as a language. If some images linger on the monochrome and very sculptural world of chalk and cellars, on their concave and convex volumes, their hollowed and engraved surfaces, others question this play between the surface and the subsoil and the places of transition between these two worlds made of passages, doors and paths.
The landscape underground is a chalk world of tortured textures, of uneven surfaces, cut, corrected, dug, marked by the tools of its own creation, and by the passages of time. It is monochromatic, and the play of shadow and light takes over the color’s meaning. The crayeres, like the cellars, are tirelessly illuminated by a primary yellow light from sodium lamps, so yellow that no photographic artifice, whether at the shooting or post-production stage, can correct it. This characteristic light resists all attempts at correction. (Also, the yellow filter, in black and white photography, has the virtue of revealing contrasts). The contrasting landscape of the vineyards of Epernay in the summer also lends itself to a very graphic approach to reveal its complex surfaces. I decide to use black and white, to produce photographs that are direct enough, without blurring, to organically document these spaces and their dialogues frontally and objectively.
All these spaces are places of conservation, places of long time. The chalk, which makes the soil, is a material that keeps the marks of time, which was extracted from the surface to dig and build, seems to tirelessly reveal a memory, a visible history.
This landscape is made of strata, whose history is the most obvious. The topology of this ancient territory bears witness to this. Graffiti, engraved in chalk, sometimes two centuries old, sometimes very recent, are omnipresent, on the surface as well as in the basement (on the soft - and therefore irresistible - walls of the cellars and chalk pits, on the surface of the millions of bottles kept there to age, on the walls and pews of the Hautvillers church,...).
The inhabitants of these places, workers in the conservation and maturation of Champagne, as well as day visitors leave their mark, a small drawing, a fantasy, more often just their own name or that of their children. The interminable corridors of the cellars bear the names of the former historical workers of the basement.
Everyone seems to want to make it their own.
Return to project