Carrieres et Lumières etc.

Jen and I went for the day to Baux-de-Provence, a hilltop castle and village near Arles, especially to see the "son et lumiere" put on in the old limestone quarry caves. The venue is utterly amazing, and we had no idea what it would be like so were taken completely aback. It's a vast space cut into the mountain, which was last used as an active quarry in 1937 I think, and in 1977 was adapted at the behest of Jean Cocteau as a display space for huge projections of photographs. It's since been leased to Culturespaces, a company that puts on amazing multimedia displays, and the current one is based on the work of Marc Chagall.

Quarry with the lights on

The picture shows something of the raw walls of the space with the lights on, as it were. I didn't get any really good pictures of the show in action, but here's one...

Show in progress

You can just about make out the people watching, the scale of the projections is enormous! Jena and I stood in the middle for best effect, and let the whole thing wash over us and envelop us. Amazing. So good, we watched it go round twice! However... the place is really really cold, being underground 'n' all, and we were chilled to the bone! Fortunately we'd taken some sleeved tops, which made it possible to stay as long as we did, but we were glad to get out into the sun!

View of some of quarry outside

After that, we headed over to the castle and village of Baux-de-Provence to check out the castle and a small exhibition of more Chagall stuff. It's built on top of a rock promontory, and totally dominates the surrounding area, making it ideal for castles and so on.

View from castle enclosure

The panorama shot shows the incredible view of vineyards and olives in the fields below. It's been like this for 000s of years! Of course, it was incredibly windy, with the Mistral blowing hard today and on a hilltop too.

We had a sandwich from a well-stocked epicerie, taken in a nice warm sheltered low-wind spot!

Highly ungroovy Brit lunch!

And then went to the Chagall exhibit, in the Yves Brayer museum - this was another guy we'd never heard of and his stuff was pretty interesting, he is a 20th century French artist known for portraying "realist" life and so on. Chagall stuff was from '77-ish, circus scenes and so on all filtered through his remarkable view of everything, he was 83 or so when he did it all, incredible to be working so hard and a lesson to us all!

Yves Brayer Musee

Great day, very inspiring!