Immersive Quarries

Cavernous halls filled with the projected light of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night folding across every wall. Tall pillars dominate and dissect the space, tiled with the glow of iconic Sunflowers. Double height ceilings dwarf the people below. Nooks, ledges and passageways offer places to perch or wander through and observe the spectacle that surrounds.

On the surface it made sense to me that Van Gogh somehow became the poster child for a certain type of immersive experience in the 2010s. The kind I mean are the ones in which vast repurposed venues are filled with ‘ken burns effect’ transitioning projections of coffee-table book friendly artists. Imagine Van Gogh, Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience, Van Gogh Alive. In name, content, format and venue type these touring shows are almost indistinguishable from each other.

If you’re looking to visually ‘immerse’ a space this way then I guess Van Gogh fits the bill… popular, highly recognisable, colourful bold impressionist visuals, works all handily out of copyright. But the intensely specific coincidence of his projected appearances around the world niggled at me and in a moment of procrastination I found myself typing into the search bar to see if there might be an answer to explain why.

What my time down the google mines taught me was that yes, there is indeed an answer. But what I also learnt was that I had been asking the wrong question in the fist place, because this story isn’t really about the iconic visuals that adorned the walls and floors, instead it is a story about the shape of the spaces themselves.

50 Million Years Ago.

Its a story that starts in Provence, not in the 19th Century when Van Gogh lived in the region, instead we go back just a smidge further some 50 million years to when this part of France was underwater. Then we wait… for many many many years as the geological consequences of this fact eventually result in the formation of large swathes of limestone deposits across France.

A place of particular interest to this story is the French village known today as Les Baux-de-Provence. Limestone excavated from the local landscape was a popular building material for the village and the surrounding area and it is near this village where we reach our destination, the limestone quarry of Les Grand Fonds.

The quarry opened in the 1800s. Then in 1935, as new building materials such as steel and concrete replaced the demand for limestone, it closed. For a while it lay dormant, until 1959 when French artist, poet and avant-garde filmmaker Jean Cocteau chose it as a location for his 1960  film Testament of Orpheus.

It is not hard to see the appeal Cocteau found in the site. Carved out of the landscape the quarry opens like a large brutalist tomb, enticing visitors in through an imposing geometric entrance. Inside… cavernous halls, tall pillars dominate and dissect the space. Double height ceilings dwarf the people below. Nooks, ledges and passageways offer places to perch or wander through and observe the spectacle that surrounds…

…a familiar shape.

The captivating spatial qualities of the quarry were of course not born from aesthetic intentions, instead they are the bi-product of utility, and in particular a method of mining called ‘room and pillar’.

And it is this shape, the seemingly superfluous negative space left behind from the early construction of Provence that has been echoing within convention centres, museums and warehouses around the world.

Carousels of the 1960s.

One such creative was French photographer and journalist Albert Plećy. Driven by a desire to break free from the constraints of the two dimensional printed image and cinema’s proscenium arch, he was experimenting with projected installations that allowed audiences to be surrounded by, walk through and become sensorially ‘immersed’.

Plećy wasn’t alone in these endevours and was part of a collaborative international community of peers. This community brought together practitioners from different creative fields such as architect Hans-Walter Mullër (who had been playing with projections and inflatables), and the highly influential Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda.

It is one of Svoboda’s installations, the Diapolyecran, exhibited at the 1967 Montreal World Fair’s Czech Pavilion, that is directly singled out as a key influence on Plećy. Iterating on Svoboda’s past work it consisted of 112 cubes, inside each of which sat 2 Kodak carousel projectors, within which were over 15,000 slides that synchronised to present a giant wall of choreogrpahed images that moved, unified and fractured.

The work of peers such as Svoboda and Mullër demonstrated the impact and potential of geometric sets as canvases for the projected image … now… if only a site existed whose form intrinsically possessed such geometric spatialised qualities, maybe somewhere coincidentally made of a naturally luminous and projector friendly material, a place that could become home to a new kind of immersive gallery…and eventually, in Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus, Plećy saw that space, the quarry at Le Grand Fonds.

Cathédrale d’Images.

In 1977 Plećy opened Cathédrale d’Images, a permanent gallery at the quarry Le Grand Fonds, a place where creatives could play with the projected image. The subject of early immersive explorations in the Cathédrale was the work of Jean Cocteau, a celebration of his role in ‘discovering’ the quarry. But in that same year, at the age of 62, Plećy died by suicide. In the year’s that followed, Plećy’s wife Anne (née Carlier) continued the vision for the space.

In 2002 Anne also passed away and for the years 2002-2008 documentation from the Cathédrale is even harder to locate. The best glimpses I could find were from scouring tags on Flickr. Here sporadic holiday snaps by passing tourists revealed pleasantly banal looking shows on subject’s like Venetian canals or the Pyramids of Giza, but nothing that provokes the same same spark as Plećy or Müller’s work.

But eventually in 2008 things start pulling back into focus and all the pieces of this story are almost in place.

‘The’ 2008 Exhibition.

In 2008 there was a problem at the Cathédrale, the next exhibition due to open would not be ready in time. Facing a hole in their programming the venue’s directors approached Annabelle Mauger, granddaughter in law of Albert and Anne Plećy. Mauger had been involved with the Cathédrale for a few years by this time, but she took this as an opportunity to step into the role of curator. Over 13 days she pulled together the site’s first ever* (*as far as any documentation I can find proves) exhibit led by a woman, and the subject of her show was of course, Mr Vincent Van Gogh.

Mauger’s resulting 2008 exhibit was credited as a success and with that success came the attention of key people both locally and internationally interested in replicating it, and it is here that the story fragments.

Following the threads that spool out from this moment proved tricky in ways that were bureaucratic, corporate and often in a language I only have a grade C GCSE in. I spent quality time popping articles about French procurement procedures and legal filings into google translate, I’ve scouted old press release pdfs, I looked into new company filings and trading name changes and tried to follow the career shifts of people via LinkedIn profiles.

One thread follows Australian Bruce Peterson, founder and CEO of a company then titled ‘Grande Exhibitions’ (since renamed to ‘Grande Experiences’). Peterson fatefully visited the quarry during a 2008 vacation. By 2011 his company were premiering a new immersive touring exhibit Van Gogh Alive - The Exhibition at the Art Science Museum in Singapore. The press release for the show credits Plećy and the Cathédrale as its inspiration, the images accompanying the release are of Mauger’s 2008 show.

Another thread follows Mauger herself who has since co-founded a new immersive experiences company lililillilil alongside Julian Baron, a projectionist who joined the Cathédrale in 2005. Their company is credited as one of the partners who tour Imagine Van Gogh.

And one thread stays closer to home with a 2010 decision by the local municipality of Les Baux-de-Provence to put the site of Le Grand Fonds as an immersive gallery up for procurement. The result of this action saw the site’s lease handed to a different private company ‘CultureSpaces’. In 2012 the Cathédrale reopened under a new name Carriers des Lumiere (Quarries of Light) with two of the venue’s recent directors joining them.

Since this decision a legal battle has played out in the French courts, rulings have favoured different sides at different times. On one side are claims that the council were biased in the procurement process, whilst the other side argues that the previous owners had not intended to commercially exploit the site. This legal fight is one that is still taking place at the time of writing.

A visit to the current rebranded website of Carriers des Lumiere presents a very abbreviated history of the site. Absent is any mention of Plećy, the Cathédrale, past exhibitions or the many people who worked on them. Instead the entire story is waved obliquely away as a “new project”. And like…IDK… as a curator myself… it strikes me as a bit of an odd choice for a private heritage company called Culturespaces to actively choose not to acknowledge the heritage of a cultural space they have been entrusted to care for.

Sedimentary Rock.

Whilst I’ve been able to put most of the key pieces into place about what happened post 2008 I’m still left reading between the lines for the specifics - but what I feel like I can see written there is the word ‘capitalism’.

Its in the marketing copy for every iteration of these Van Goghs where the pressures of IP law and commerce for me feel most visible. Here each show jockeys for position by staking their own claim towards prestige and legitimacy… ‘The First’... ‘The Most Visited’... ‘The Original’... with these few words the people, ideas, experimentation, collaboration that all led to this point have been flattened out and regurgitated in their most profitable form.

The initial wave of Immersive Van Gogh exhibits eventually gave way to new iterations that stuck cautiously to the original commercial formula, 'Immersive insert coffee-table book friendly artist here’. As the success of these shows waxed (and in recent years has begun to wane) they have been met by a cynical response from cultural critics.

But what my idle procrastination taught me, is that dismissing these exhibitions based on face value has stopped us from seeing the apt geological metaphor that they actually are. They are but the exposed surface of a rich and deeply layered sedimentary rock. Taking the time to bore down deeper reveals overlayed histories of technology, bureaucracy, engineering, creativity and geology that eventually leads us 50 million years into the past to when France lay beneath the sea.

Immersive Quarries.

I’ve often wondered what name this mode of display might eventually end up taking. Other established display terminologies - Cabinets of Curiosity… Salon-Style Hanging … White Cube Gallery… remind me that maybe this name won’t be defined by the work on display but instead the form it takes, and a name that gestures towards the history that lead to that shape.

When I think about it there is also a pleasing symmetry in the repurposed sites of industry that both past and present day ‘this kind of immersive experience’ exhibitions tend to find themselves within - a convention centre, an old bank, a converted stables, a repurposed warehouse and initially - an immersive quarry.

Further Reading.

• Quarries of Light, María Nieto Sánchez’s (2015).
  This three part series and research on the quarry is essential. This series is the only place I could find that had documented and pulled this history of the site together and helped lead me to critical resources.

• Hommes des Images, Albert Plećy (1997).
  A critical book that covers Plećy’s career and broader work both as a photographer and in the immersive arts space. Its out of print (and French language), but there are second hand copies around. (I might actually see if I can get a scanned version onto the Internet Archive library?)

• Polyecran, Monoskop wiki (last edited 2023).
  A wonderful wiki that has details of Joseph Svoboda’s influential installations documented.

• Image Totale, lililillilil
  A history of Plećy’s, Image Totale © documented by his granddaughter in law Annabelle Mauger’s studio.

• Big V: LUME creator Bruce Peterson reveals what shaped his ‘grande vision’, Herald Sun (2024), Matt Johnston.
  Doesn’t do it in a particularly complimentary or detailed way though does he?

• Immersive van Gogh Experiences Bloom Like Sunflowers, the New York Times (2021)
  In which the author asks ‘but why’ and then fails to actually give us the answer. Although this article does at least cite Mauger and her influential 2008 show.

• A French Quarry Is Now the Site of a Stunning Immersive Experience, Art News Adam Schrader (2024).
  How soon is now? The genesis of the story is here, but it then proceeds to take a big ole step over the years 1977-2012.