Everything in this place will outlive me

INSTANTS, a Château Palmer & Leica Art residence

Launched in 2023 with the support of its historic partner Leica, the INSTANTS residency is an artistic adventure through which Château Palmer affirms its support for contemporary photographic creation.

This annual residency, organised across several creative periods, offers the guest photographer total carte blanche to produce a personal artistic work, freely inspired by the ecosystem of Château Palmer, the vision and values of the estate, as well as its terroir and wider region. After Paul Cupido, Henrike Stahl and SMITH, Alexandra Catiere is the fourth resident invited to photographically interpret this place inhabited by the living and memory.

You could be forgiven for thinking that her photographs had always been there, that they had been freshly rediscovered in an old trunk, taken from a notebook lost on a riverbank a century ago. The fourth artist invited to the INSTANTS residency at Château Palmer, Alexandra Catiere returned to working with the large-format view camera, set up for several months among the stones and vineyards of the estate. From there, she followed the passage of time by superimposing layered images like layers of paint, capturing the vast and beautiful self-evidence of nature that survives the generations of men and women who have passed through it.

"I definitely didn’t want to photograph the vines or the grapes. It seemed too literal, too obvious. I had to try something else. Focus my gaze on less expected elements, such as the role of trees in the vineyard, the produce from the orchard, and yes, even the silverware. In a similar way, I was struck by some graffiti on one of the castle walls upstairs, evidence of the German occupation during the World War II. This gave me the idea of using it as a base, a palimpsest of sorts, a first layer of paint that I could cover with other images. I reproduced this process with the harvest notebooks kept by the former managers, the Chardon family, superimposing images of what continues to exist today onto the handwritten pages from the past. That was the turning point of this residency, which became far more than a carte blanche. It allowed me to explore what has always obsessed me, this idea that history is not chronological but condensed within us. All the layers of the past—my Belarusian childhood, collective traumas, my artistic encounters—coexist simultaneously in my body and memory, resurfacing unexpectedly through a place, an object, or a light. At Château Palmer, everything spoke to me: the graffiti, the noteb oks, the silverware, the trees that have witnessed generations of winemakers. These material traces reminded me of the frescoes of Pompeii, which continue to speak across the centuries. While photographing the estate, I realized that I was not trying to freeze the present moment, but to reveal this depth of time, this invisible accumulation that allows a place to breathe long after those who inhabited it have gone. This is where the title of the work was born: Everything Here Will Outlive Me. Not out of melancholy, but as a serene certainty."