Uprooted from the shade, disconnected from the sky, an esteemed contributor to a responsible society, a boulevard companion, a square patriarch, the tree is nevertheless not civilised. Tamed as an individual, it remains savage as a people (even if kept in good order). […] The three-piece suit suits it just as well as the tunic of the imprecating ascetic.

Pierre Lieutaghi, L’Arbre qui cache la forêt mère, 1999

After the flower and the bird, this summer’s exhibition at Flamanville Castle is dedicated to the tree. While the dahlia conservatory garden and the rookery, both in the grounds, have inspired previous exhibitions, it is the tree, the main character in the grounds of the Château, that provides the inspiration for this exhibition. Here, the familiar, good fellow chestnut tree stands alongside the haughty silhouette of the beech, at the top of which nestles the rook. In the sparse alleyway, one leans in kindly towards the visitor, while further on, where the haunting cawing echoes, the other seems to stand guard over its feathered companions. Inspired by these dual figures, the exhibition takes us on a journey into the imaginary world of the tree.

Personified, once a feminine figure in Greek and Latin antiquity, now a masculine figure in modern Latin societies, the tree, sometimes stoic, sometimes vengeful, shelters and protects, traps and punishes. Because it escapes our understanding and literally transcends us, because it precedes us and outlives us, the tree is the vessel of our imaginations, our hopes and our fears.

It is the tree of childhood, our own and that of the world, that Yasuyuki Takagi photographs on the island of Yakushima and its virgin forest; enter its thicket and you will find Loren Capelli’s drawing of the great tree in whose shade the child measures his own growth and climbs ever higher. Then comes a sound of a voice, telling us the story of a tree uprooted in Gap, a coin from ancient Rome and the rings of Saturn, in a video by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond that links roots and sky, the depths of the earth and the cosmos, with the pine tree in the family garden as an intercessor. Uprooted, too, is the tree we see floating at sea in Salomé Jashi’s film, strapped to a boat, moving away from the village that surrounds it to the park of a billionaire in Georgia. In Teo Becher’s work, the tree in the Soignes forest, trunk, stump and branches intertwined, links the ancient past of a primary forest in Northern Europe with contemporary human exploitation and its slag. The tree, which stretches out and opens its arms wide, hosts in Riitta Päiväläinen’s work strange ghosts, reminiscent of the rags with which votive trees were once covered. In Poland, reveals Natalia Romik, the trunk of the Josef oak became a refuge during the Second World War for two Jewish brothers trying to escape execution.

In the grounds of the Château, a series of photographs by Mélanie Dornier is dedicated to wish trees.

Whether firmly rooted in a primeval forest in the Pacific or uprooted from a village square in Georgia, a tender companion to a child or a refuge for those persecuted during the war, the tree here stands sentinel, on the watch. Permeable to everything, to heavenly water and earthly madness, to our fantasy of eternity and our anguish of finitude, the tree is a landmark: who knows, perhaps it will know how to deal with this thing, existence?