The exhibition by Vanessa Gilles, “Sara, la mémoire de l’eau,” is presented until February 8, 2026, in partnership with the theatre during the Flamenco Festival at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nîmes; Barbara Gouget is the curator.
Sara la Noire, a saint venerated by the Romani people at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, lives in stories, memories, and traditions, and becomes a symbol of protection and passage.
Sara, la mémoire de l’eau examines how a community passes on what it can neither fix nor archive: faith, exile, protection, memory. The Romani people carry within their history long journeys. Leaving northern India, they crossed lands and seas, faced borders and obstacles, making water a central element: passage, promise, and memory. This memory of movement resonates with the story of the Saintes, forced to flee Palestine to land on the shores of the Camargue. These foundational migrations and crossings highlight the central role of water as an operator of memory: it separates, connects, erases, and transmits.
Tradition holds that the boat that landed at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer carried nine people, among them Marie Salomé, Marie Jacobé, Marthe, Marie Madeleine. Sara’s presence on this crossing remains uncertain. Two versions coexist: that of written tradition, which places her in the boat, and that of oral tradition, which situates her on the shore, welcoming the Saintes with a blue veil, like a protective guide. This uncertainty grounds her symbolic power and creates a space for transmission. Sara’s cape, a symbol of oral tradition, thus becomes a protective mantle and a threshold between land and water, between the visible and the invisible.
Vanessa Gilles’s work is driven by a desire to transmit a memory. Photography is a vehicle for narrative and a vehicle for presence. It gathers traces, survivals, and resonances of gestures, voices, and gazes, allowing memory to circulate rather than solidify. The capes printed on silk by the Chic Philippe Moyen workshop transform photography into a vibratory presence. Silk catches light, breath, and movement: the image leaves the register of evidence to enter that of sensitive, embodied transmission.
Presented as textile sanctuaries, these works converse with portraits of Romani women and children immersed in ritual water. Immersion is not an aesthetic motif, but a gesture of memory: entrusting oneself to water as one entrusts a story.
Vanessa Gilles : Sara, la mémoire de l’eau
Until February 8, 2026
Musée des Beaux Arts – Nîmes
Rue de la Cité Foulc
30000 Nîmes, France
https://www.nimes.fr/que-faire-a-nimes/culture/les-musees-le-planetarium/musee-des-beaux-arts
