Exposition “Recife” de Cécile Genest

“At first, it was as dark as a full moon,” explained American researcher Owen Toon in a press release. 65 million years ago, the impact of a ten-kilometre meteorite that fell in the Yucatan, combined with increased volcanic activity, had a global impact: this coincidence plunged the Earth into darkness for almost two years, with a collapse in photosynthesis. What did the land look like in those troubled times? Today, where can we find traces of this earthly genesis? In Recife, the Loire chapter of the À nos terres troubles series, Cécile Genest raises these questions in the form of a photographic tale rooted in our soils. By photographing the components of biodiversity on the banks of the Loire and its catchment area, Cécile Genest goes in search of the evolutionary history of botany and offers an ode to the living things in our hedges, banks, ponds, scrub, forests and plant walls. At the same time, she reproduces images of fossil plants, questioning the thickness of time in the sensitive things that surround us, whether perishable or perennial. The bed of the river and its tributaries, invisible but present in a muted way, gives way to a contemporary herbarium, where the portrait of a mysterious island sometimes emerges. The rock and the force of life intermingle in the image of the fresh and salt waters of the estuary, and the patches of herbaceous plants on the reef are transformed into tropical soil, a pretext for various fantasies of the wild and original landscape. Exhibition presented as part of the 2025 Photographic Season – The Loire, a sensitive space, organised by the Département de Maine-et-Loire (Conservation départementale du patrimoine), in partnership with the Maison Julien Gracq, and with the collaboration of the Nantes Natural History Museum. Visiting languages:French