Remaining active during the renovation work, with a programme hosted in the former MATOU (Musée de l’Affiche de Toulouse), the famous brick building will reopen its doors onthe 22nd of November. Along with the in-depth renovation, improved access and visitor flow await all audiences. A redesigned visitor route and enhancements on the garden side will complete the architectural facelift of Toulouse’s photography centre, founded by Jean Dieuzaide. Occupying all three available spaces, Sophie Zénon’s exhibition L’humus du monde launches this new chapter. The site’s distinctive configuration inspired the artist to devise a scenography that makes use of its circular shape, for her a metaphor of the cycle of life and death, a showcase for her favourite themes – memory, history, the passage of time. The exhibition unfolds as a previously unseen conversation. Encounter.
Jean-Jacques Ader : You are the first to exhibit for the reopening of the Château d’Eau with a major exhibition, even though you don’t like to use the word “retrospective”?
Sophie Zénon : I prefer to define this exhibition as a journey through nearly thirty years of creations (1996–2025), closely bound up with a life journey. The exhibition presents a selection of a little over one hundred works. The first strong idea was to take into account the circular physiognomy of the site. I worked on the idea of the circle as a metaphor for the cycle of life and death, for transformation and rebirth. The Château d’Eau is a marvellous showcase for my work, which is entirely devoted to these notions, shaped by my university studies on shamanism in Northern Asia and on our relationship with the dead and with death.
This is your first time here
SZ : Absolutely. And I am honoured to be reopening this legendary and historic venue, the first centre in France devoted to photography, opened in 1974. You don’t invest it as you would any other place. I worked on this exhibition for many many months… the stakes are high and stimulating; a strong project was needed, one to equal these stakes.
And in fact you are occupying all the spaces
SZ : Yes, the Tower with its basement and ground floor, as well as Gallery 2. I am not showing only photographs, but also artist’s books, videos, three-dimensional objects, paper sculptures. My work is protean, with different visual languages, always leaving an important place for gesture and for skills. The studio is not for me only a place of execution; it is above all the place of thought. I like to create universes, to make works converse with one another, always taking the architecture of the site into account. For each of my new exhibitions, I conceive a new creation. For this one in Toulouse, I produced four skulls in hard porcelain, hand-embroidered by my friend, the textile artist Aurélie Lanoiselée, around the theme of the four elements – water, air, earth and fire. Their particularity is that they were made in Limoges from the MRI of my own skull, modelled in volume in resin to make a mould and then cast in porcelain.
You also thought about the artistic position of this gallery within the local cultural environment
SZ : Given my preferred themes, I am regularly invited by museums to respond in visual form to their archives. Imagining a project rooted in a territory while taking its history or skills into account fascinates me. Usually, artists are invited to intervene in museums in order to bring their works into dialogue with those in the museum. For L’humus du monde, I took the opposite approach. I asked four museums of the City of Toulouse (the Musée des Augustins, the Musée des Arts Précieux Paul-Dupuy, the Musée Saint-Raymond and Les Abattoirs) to allow me to extract from their collections objects, paintings, sculptures and videos. These works punctuate my own. They are never illustrations, but works by artists who matter in my trajectory, my “elective affinities”. These works will, in a way, sketch in hollow a portrait of who I am and what drives me.
Did the heads of these other institutions play along?
SZ : Four hundred per cent! The directors and curators of the four institutions saw in this proposal an opportunity for their audiences, by bringing the works from their museums into dialogue with contemporary practice. This proposal also chimed with the dynamic both of the City and of the Château d’Eau team, who increasingly wish to broaden this kind of initiative.
Is there a publication to accompany the event?
SZ : Absolutely. I worked with Lia Pradal, founder of the publishing house Païen based in Ariège, to produce not an exhibition catalogue but an artist’s book devoted to L’herbe aux yeux bleus, my most recent body of work on obsidional plants, which is shown on the ground floor of the Tower of the Château d’Eau.
A word about the choice of the title L’humus du monde?
SZ : With pleasure. For me, it is a title that is read as much as it is breathed. It sums up my work on its own. Imagine that you are walking in a forest on a summer’s day after a heavy storm: the ground is still warm and smells of leaves, earth and mushrooms rise to the surface, smells of decomposition but also of nourishing ferment. This title manages to reconcile both the idea of stratification of history, the passage of time and renewed vitality – an evocation of the perpetual cycle of death and life.
Text and interview by Jean-Jacques Ader.
L’humus du monde, an exhibition by Sophie Zénon at the gallery Le Château d’Eau in Toulouse, from 22 November 2025 to 8 March 2026. Publication of L’herbe aux yeux bleus with éditions Païen. Information: https://chateaudeau.toulouse.fr/
