Skies, Lands, Seas, Fires: An Atlas of Metamorphoses

Sara Ouhaddou & Younès Rahmoun

From July 11th to November 29th

Curated by: Véronique Collard-Bovy

Rooted in the heart of a rural and natural territory classified as Natura 2000, the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Châteauvert (CACC) is a unique space where art, landscape and society converge. Set within a verdant setting crossed by the Argens river and surrounded by a ten-hectare sculpture garden, it offers a unique space for experimentation where contemporary creation and environment are in constant dialogue.

At the crossroads of elements and worlds, the Mediterranean sets a landscape in which forms, beliefs and gestures have never ceased to transform. An inland sea, a cradle of civilisations, a space of crossings: it is a shifting geography where ancient memories and contemporary rebirths intertwine. Skies, Lands, Seas, Fires proposes to explore this ever-evolving heritage through an atlas of metamorphoses: skies as mirrors of the imagination, lands as living archives, waters as a medium of circulation and transmission, fires as the primal energy of breath and creation.

The invited artists, Sara Ouhaddou and Younès Rahmoun, bring this atlas to life by reinventing ancient gestures — from weaving to glass lamps, from Sufi rituals to the cosmologies of everyday life — transposing them into the present to open new forms of dialogue between shores. Their practice, grounded in craft, spirituality and experimentation, weaves a Mediterranean narrative in which tradition and contemporaneity illuminate one another. Between the circulation of know-how, the transformation of materials and the reactivation of vernacular motifs, the exhibition sketches a fluid, traversed, reinvented Mediterranean: a sea of shared transformations.

This project, led by the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Châteauvert of the Provence Verte Agglomeration, is made possible through the support of the Institut Français as part of the Saison Méditerranée, the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, and the Région Sud Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.