In the middle of nothing, there is a work, a gigantic work. But is it really a work, very unusual, or a motionless movement?
The Saumurois and the cave dwellings
It is in the Saumur region that we find the largest concentration of cave dwellings, since there are about 14,000 cavities dug into the soft tufa.
It is thought that by the end of the 18th century, about half of the population lived in this way.
Then, little by little, this type of habitat nested in the cliffs disappeared, and after the Second World War, the last cavities were abandoned.
So much so that the small "village" of the Orbière became, outright, a wild dump.
Jacques Warminski
Jacques Warminski is an artist about whom little is known, apart from the fact that he graduated from the Boulle school as an interior designer.
It seems that the terrestrial propeller was his life's work, prepared for a long time before finally being realized, in four years, towards the end of his life, since he died two years after completing it.
The terrestrial propeller: a long march towards realization.
As a child, Jacques Warminski spent his holidays around the Orbière. When he returned, with his fabulous project in mind, he found the place almost full of rubbish and abandoned houses.
He will spend 10 years looking one by one for the owners, or their descendants, who, for some, had even forgotten that they had a house there. He bought them one by one! And then, once that was done, it still took him months to clear the rubbish accumulated there.
Shadow and light, convex and concave...
So he began his work in 1990, and he sculpts the most remote cavity of geometrical forms, abstract figures. This work forced him to clear in a few months a mass of rubble estimated at about 10,000 tons!
This propeller thus leads us from the bottom of the earth to the free sky, from night to day.
And this ambivalence is also found, in a very concrete way, in the realization, since each rib of each hollowed shape is meticulously raised. And these measurements make it possible to create moulds for casting concrete shapes that are the "positive", exact, inverted echoes of the shapes found in the shadows of the worked troglodytes.
We will therefore discover, outside, a crazy saraband of concrete shapes.
And it's a spiral that spins from the bottom to the top, from night to day, from convex to concave...
Nature...
Nature is what it is, and it will get back to its rights as soon as possible. That's why she tends to nibble at the earth's propeller! But a handful (a big handful!) of enthusiastic volunteers oppose it. On the other hand, from time to time, to be effective, it is still necessary to commit rather heavy means, and, in this case, there is only one solution: to open a subscription. If you want to participate, you have the contact details of the association that takes care of it below .
L'Hélice Terrestre
16, L'Orbière
Saint-Georges-des-Sept-Voies
49350 Gennes
Tél. : 02 41 57 95 92
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