After the dahlia conservatory garden, explored last year in an exhibition devoted to the flower, this year it’s another component of the Château de Flamanville environment that forms the starting point for the summer themed exhibition: the rookery established in the Château grounds. Made up of a colony of rooks, it consists of a series of nests perched high up, around which the rooks, in circular flights, are bustling.

For centuries, the corvid has been the prey of our obsession with it: few birds as much as the raven have been ‘charged’ – and the task is a heavy one – with embodying vices and (more rarely) virtues. While the Vikings surrounded their god Odin with two ravens, one personifying thought and the other, memory, Christianity has made the raven an evil animal for a long time to come. In medieval times, the black bird symbolised fallen man, sullied by the mud of his sins. Later, from Romanticism to the present day, it remains associated with the announcement of certain misfortune. It is only very recently, thanks in particular to new studies on animal intelligence, that the way we look at corvids has changed, acknowledging that they have exceptional cognitive abilities, equalling or even surpassing those of the great apes. And here we have the wild raven once again coming closer to man, this time from the highest spheres rather than the underworld.

This succession of interpretations, these ‘uses’ of the raven, is the starting point for this themed exhibition. Combining photography, drawing and volume, the artists here lend the acuity of their gaze to the observation of birds, from the raven to the so-called ‘Social Republican’, placing at the heart of the exhibition the questions of habitat and the adaptation of these beings to their environments, in mutation.

An exhibition curated by the Centre photographique Rouen Normandie.

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To echo the exhibition, birdwatching tours accompanied by Laurent Legrand, L’Oiseau arpenteur, are available in the park of the Château on July 21, August 4 and 18, and September 17, at 10 am. Free, booking required: mairie@flamanville.fr T. 02 33 87 66 66