The Musée Soulages, Rodez – EPCC presents the exhibition Agnès Varda. Je suis curieuse. Point. It is introduced by this text.
“I’m curious. Period. I find everything very interesting. Real life. Fake life…” A.V.
In 2025, the Mediterranean Sea arrives in Rodez with its horizon, blue and calm, its beaches, its small fishing community, its plastic toys, its cabins, its demonstrations—in short, its changing life and the portrait that Agnès Varda has painted of it over all these years, and the tender memory it leaves in each of us.
Agnès Varda (1928-2019) is a major figure in cinema and photography, who made her mark in the visual arts late in life. The Soulages Museum has decided to pay tribute to her in the summer of 2025: Agnès Varda. Je suis curieuse. Point (June 28, 2025 – January 4, 2026).
Agnès Varda, photographer and filmmaker, had a rich career that flourished in the 60s and 70s. She belongs to the history of world cinema. After practicing photography at the TNP (Théâtre National Populaire) and Jean Vilar’s troupe for the Avignon festival, it was cinema that occupied most of her time: close to Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, William Klein and of course Jacques Demy, who would become her companion, Agnès Varda shared her sociological and imaginative appetite within this small group known as the “Left Bank”. Together, they distinguished themselves from the “Right Bank” group led by young filmmakers and critics from Cahiers du Cinéma, including Godard, Rivette, Rohmer and Truffaut.
Agnès Varda’s works deal with political and social issues, such as feminist demands (“Women are right to shout,” she stated in 2017). In her extensive filmography, we should mention her first feature film – La Pointe Courte, shot in Sète (1955), Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), L’une chante l’autre pas (1977), the disturbing Sans toit ni loi (1985) – Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival the same year -… fiction films followed by numerous feature-length documentaries, including Mur murs (1981), Les Plages d’Agnès (2008), Visages, Villages co-directed with the artist JR in 2017… The universe of Agnès Varda’s images appears varied and abundant, suitable for being declined with originality.
Starting in 2003, Agnès Varda developed her activity as a visual artist with installations, projections, multiple screens, and through an ingenious recycling: astonishing “cinema cabins”. It all began at the Venice Biennale in 2003, then in many other institutions such as the Fondation Cartier (2006), the 10th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Lyon (2009), Le “Voyage à Nantes” (2012), and the Domaine de Chaumont in 2019 for her last solo exhibition.
The Soulages Museum’s exhibition project plays on the friendship between Pierre and Colette Soulages and Agnès Varda in Sète, a bond she immortalized first in The Beaches of Agnès and then in Agnès de Ci de Là: the Soulages Museum owns a number of photographs of the painter taken by the filmmaker and her film crew. An interview with Soulages about his Outrenoir paintings is being shown in the museum’s permanent galleries.
In a way, we wanted to continue the exchange, to enlarge it up in Rodez with the presentation of Varda’s work.
The Rodez exhibition is an ode to curiosity: freely associating Agnès Varda’s photographic collection around the filming of La Pointe Courte (compositions on the world of the port, fishermen, the Mediterranean) with the construction of huts, and numerous evocations of the sea and beaches and her work as a visual artist: Bord de mer (2009), La petite mer immense (2003), Ping-Pong, Tong et camping (2006), Le dépôt de la Cabane de Plage (2011), La Cabane du Bonheur (2018), and other unpublished color photographs of Noirmoutier and its fishermen’s huts. The environment of the film Le Bonheur released in 1965 will be evoked poetically: with flowers, sunflowers, bouquets, in vases by Valentine Schlegel and some photographs from the filming. This association of black and white and color photographs, objects and film installations, composes a unique itinerary, a scenography unfolding in history.
The singularly silent photography of her early days will be extended with visual and non-visual writing, objects… Beyond cinema, it represents a part of Varda, a major feature of her modus operandi.
The exhibition will embody her research and her passions as an artist. We will associate the entire exhibition with a familiar environment, that is, works by the painter and friend Pierre Soulages, the sculptor Alexander Calder, works by Valentine Schlegel, Miquel Barceló, models, and objects. A nod will be made to the early photographer of the sea and sky in Sète, Gustave le Gray (1820-1884) – The Moonlight Brick, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay.
This exhibition, open to the general public, will run for six months at the Soulages Museum, with calls for film and specific initiatives aimed at schools and students. This exhibition is co-produced with Rosalie Varda and the entire Ciné-Tamaris team, based on Rue Daguerre, where Agnès Varda set down her suitcases and cameras in 1951. The exhibition, made up of more than 150 items, unfolds like the story of a life that brings Agnès Varda back to the sea.
The Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the ebb and flow, the detail or the immensity, form the keystone of Varda’s spirit.
Benoît Decron curator / director of Soulages Museum, Rodez
Agnès Varda : Je suis curieuse. Point
June 28, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Musée Soulages, Rodez – EPCC
Jardin du Foirail, Av. Victor Hugo
12000 Rodez, France
https://musee-soulages-rodez.fr/
