It is a pretty village located halfway between Rennes and Vannes. A postcard setting whose landscapes are rightly praised by the Brittany tourist office. La Gacilly is actually much more than that. For twenty years, the locality has also and above all been the seat of a photographic festival unique in France. A free outdoor event that deploys large prints in unexpected spaces: on the facade of the beautiful granite houses of the town, at the end of a dark alley, in fields and forests. The event attracts, year after year, more than 300,000 visitors, where the village has less than 4,000 inhabitants.
This summer again, the event will transform the place. Its theme (“La Nature en patrimoine”) resonates with the ecological concerns of the moment. “We are not trying to remake the world, just to prevent it from unraveling,” says, as a leitmotif, Auguste Coudray, president and co-founder of the festival. “By creating this event, we were keen to make the public think about the relationship that our human society has with its environment,” adds Jacques Rocher, Mayor of La Gacilly.
The magnificent prints by David Doubilet, a regular on the pages of National Geographic, reveal to us the seabed threatened by global warming. “The ocean floor is dying but we are looking elsewhere. If my photos can raise awareness of the danger that threatens, I will feel that I have fulfilled my mission,” he says. Lorraine Turci holds more or less the same discourse. This young photographer has, in fact, accompanied the crew of the Dolmen, a trawler from Keroman, near Lorient, during a long fishing campaign. The images she brought back testify to the extreme vulnerability of this ecosystem.
These photos, sometimes distressing (such as that of a giant landfill made by Vasconcellos, and which covers a wall almost 6 meters wide), are tempered by the humor of Sacha Goldberger, who presents extraterrestrials having had to flee their planet become uninhabitable by their fault.
The beautiful portraits of Nadia Ferroukhi, Vee Speers, Joana Choumali, Nazli Abbaspour, Yasuyoshi Chiba as well as David and Peter Turnley are also there to comfort us by presenting a youth which, as exhibition curator Cyril Drouhet points out, constitutes “a generation committed to making humankind cohabit sustainably with its natural environment”.
Something to ponder this quote from George Sand that the organizers of this event have placed in their catalog: “Many say: After us, the end of the world. It is the most hideous and fatal blasphemy that can be uttered. It is the formula of resignation, because it is the breaking of the bond which unites the generations and which makes them solidary with each other. »
Nature as a legacy, La Gacilly photo festival (Morbihan), until October 1.
