Zone i, a maze of photographic nostalgia in the Loir-et-Cher

These two had to come across a stock of eight hundred patio doors for their project to take shape. To flee Paris, Monica Santos and Mat Jacob – she a graphic designer and scenographer, he a photographer, both co-founders of Blurred Tendency collective – settled in 2018 in an old mill and its three small islands, in Thoré-la-Rochette, a few kilometers from Montoire (Loir-et-Cher). There, they discover a cluster of doors in the barn of an old farmhouse converted into a hangar for a building materials company. It is therefore in the middle of the fields, or almost, that the two artists will create a cultural space dedicated to the image and the environment. A year later, Zone i (like “flood zone”) opened, with its funny labyrinth.

Monica Santos, artist: “We repopulated these old doors as a look into the past”

From the small departmental road, it is the first image that emerges: a tangle of doors planted in a meadow, like a vast joke. When you approach, you understand even less: on almost all the wooden, Formica or glass doors, photographs, most of them in black and white. Portraits of men, women, children, serious, funny or stuffy. Groups taken at random, in clusters in front of a house, posing leaning on the bonnet of a car or coming out of a wedding… so many scenes of rural life, from the beginning of the 20th century.^e century to the 1980s, whose details are sought in hairstyles, clothes and everyday objects, while an electroacoustic sound composition alternates with oral testimonies.

On the blue-backed paper (printing medium that can withstand bad weather), looks, smiles, sometimes seriousness. The rain and the wind have done their job too: the black and white fades on some posters, others are torn. “We repopulated these old doors as a look into the past”, explains Monica Santos. Like the metaphor of a place where you get lost, looking for a thread in these faces looking at you, the magic of “labyrinth” operate immediately.

living land art

To build this maze made of scrap wood and glass, the two called on an artist from Vendôme, Jean-Philippe Manchien, but also on the surrounding population. “We didn’t have enough doors to carry out our installation, so we called on the locals. Afterwards, they came to see where we had put their door. We did the same with the family photos., says Mat Jacob. This resulted in a living and touching work of land art. For two years, plants have started to climb on the lintels and plinths, young oaks and walnut trees to grow in the middle of the route, reinforcing the poetic nostalgia of the place.

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