With the appointment in February 2024 of Lydie Marchi as head of the art center and general commissioner of the festival, this thirty-fifth edition opens a new cycle of the Gers event.
After a very first program in Spring 2024, to get started – Entre deux mondes by Robin Lopvet – this is the first summer in Lectoure for Lydie Marchi. Art historian, Lydie Marchi started at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in 2010. She then participated in co-founding, in Marseille, the contemporary drawing salon Paréidolie, while working in the northern districts de la Castellane, where numerous reception and artist residency projects have been developed.
In 2019 she took charge of the Châteauvert art center, in the Var, a small village of 141 inhabitants with Brad Pitt as a neighbor and an 800 m2 artistic center. Then, at the end of five years in office, still with the idea of a rural project, she decided to apply to Lectoure where she had already come to discover the Photographic Summer.
While adopting an eco-responsibility approach, Terra Nostra will mainly evoke the notion of hospitality, a central and claimed notion. It is also the feeling that the new director felt when she came to take up her duties at Lectoure, where she was warmly welcomed.
“In the light of ecological and societal upheavals, Terra nostra allows us to discover or rediscover the richness of the lands we tread upon through a poeticized, even sometimes transformed, reality.”
On the program therefore, a film by Driss Aroussi in a beautiful new location, the Corhaut tower. On the ground floor of the Bladé school, a Franco-Portuguese artist, Esmeralda Da Costa, who works with photos on wood, a tribute to the nourishing earth. Then upstairs, a focus on the young generation of Corsican photographers who represent the issues specific to the island of beauty from a documentary and poetic perspective; six artists selected with the help of Madeleine Filippi.
Also, a monumental installation by Thomas Mailaender made up of around a hundred stoneware pottery, jars, pots and plates transforms the village’s grain market into an archaeological exhibition. Juliette Agnel and Elaine Ling share the spaces of the art center, presenting their sacred landscapes, their minerality and the relationship of living beings to their environment. La Cerisaie is taken over by Les ÉpouxP: in the garden, visitors are invited to flash on the patterns of the suspended hangings with their smartphone, and inside a real camera obscura awaits you. Along the Allée Montmorency and on the Boulevard du Nord, the macabre dance scenes of Kahn & Selesnick are performed by the inhabitants of Lectoure themselves, completing the list of seven exhibitions hosted this year.
Jean-Jacques Ader
“Terra Nostra” The Lectoure Photographic Summer (Gers), from July 20 to September 29, 2024 – For all information on events, workshops or guided tours see: https://centre-photo-letoure.fr/
