Art trail – Christmas in Fontevraud 2025

Hellène Gaulier and Gwenolé Gasnier have created a large table setting for you, inspired by Christmases spent together and Christmases imagined elsewhere. With a series of absurd and joyful machines, they attempt to recreate a Christmas atmosphere that is both magical and chaotic.

A Christmas meal is certainly made up of food, but also decorations, sounds, smells, memories, arguments, and laughter. Hellène and Gwénolé take common traditions, sprinkle them with the unexpected, and set the scene for a Christmas where anything can happen.

Outside, a snowstorm rages around a Christmas tree, while inside, you can smell the reassuring scent of a fire in the fireplace. Multicolored lights flash in time with your heartbeat, while the abbesses, dressed in their finery, invite you to take their place around the table. The smell of ritual foods wafts from all sides, bottles are emptied again and again, and glasses clink together. Voices and laughter mingle in a familiar hubbub. The protagonists are in place, the evening is just beginning, it’s Christmas, and no one knows what will happen…

The Neapolitan tradition of nativity scenes is honored this year with a Nativity scene created especially for Fontevraud by a Neapolitan craftsman. Heir to an art form from the 17th and 18th centuries prized by the elite, the Neapolitan nativity scene is distinguished by its rich decorations and elegant costumes. The figures, meticulously crafted by hand, have terracotta faces, wooden limbs, and bodies made of hemp and wire. For Fontevraud, nearly 90 38-cm figurines illustrate the Nativity scene, daily life in Naples, and the history of the Abbey, in a Baroque setting inspired by Neapolitan and Loire architecture.

A true work of art and craftsmanship, the Neapolitan nativity scene combines religious devotion, popular beliefs, and aesthetic contemplation. At the crossroads of the sacred and the profane, it is full of symbols and offers multiple interpretations, ranging from paganism to Catholicism and local traditions. Like a miniature theater, it tells the story of human life as much as the birth of Christ.

Marco and Antonella d’Auria (sets and characters), Sonia Kiang (sound composition), Cyril Lepage (lighting design), Nicolas Barreau and Jules Charbonnet (set design)

• November 29 to February 1
• Choir of the abbey church

Asters was created in 2020, when Kerwin Rolland designed it for the cloister of the Grand-Moûtier as part of the 4th edition of Christmas at Fontevraud. Unfortunately, the COVID pandemic prevented the public from experiencing it.

In 2025, Fontevraud Abbey and the artist are bringing this creation back to life, adapting it especially for the Saint-Benoît courtyard. For this new version, Kerwin Rolland enriches his work with the sounds of the bells from the Fontevraud Abbey’s À toute volée program and the Nantes bell towers, recorded and modified for Dominique Blais’s work entitled À Flot d’airain, as part of the Voyage en hiver since 2022 in the city of Nantes.

The reactivation of Asters will echo a concert—the result of the meeting of the worlds of Blais and Rolland—that the artists will perform on November 22, 2025, to celebrate the inauguration of the Voyage en hiver and the reopening of Nantes Cathedral.

A monumental moon in the heart of the cloister by Makiko Furuichi

In the center of the large cloister, a giant moon nine meters in diameter lies on the lawns like a celestial body that has descended from the sky.

This monumental work has two sides: one realistic, evoking the mysterious face of the moon; the other vibrant with colors and shapes, faithful to the artist’s dreamlike and pictorial universe.

This duality reflects the encounter between observation and imagination, silence and celebration, shadow and light. The moon, symbol of cycle and rebirth, becomes here the benevolent star of Christmas at Fontevraud, illuminating the cloister and accompanying visitors in joyful contemplation.

A sound universe by Aline Gorisse

Around this moon, sound artist Aline Gorisse has created an installation for twelve speakers, enveloping visitors in a moving musical space.

Conceived as a sensory journey, this sound creation varies according to the audience’s trajectory: no two listening experiences are ever the same.

Three musical loops of different lengths intertwine and recompose themselves endlessly, generating new combinations with each step.

Aline Gorisse’s work is based on the abbey’s six historic bells, whose sounds, transformed and amplified, form the foundation of her composition.

She combines them with other sound textures inspired by Makiko’s colors and graphic composition, creating a correspondence between light and vibration, between the visual and the auditory.

The moon thus becomes both a source of light and music, a celestial body inhabited by resonances.

“I propose an immersive exhibition in the Abbey’s Romanesque kitchens, featuring sculptures, bas-reliefs and ceramic figures. This collection of works lays the foundations for a medieval mythology specific to Fontevraud, combining historical and archaeological anecdotes with the legends and speculations that have surrounded the Romanesque kitchens over the centuries. The space will be punctuated by figures positioned on large white brick pedestals in the centre of each of the apsidioles.

The exhibition will be designed as an adventure game: visitors will be able to follow the exhibition route with the help of a book, an exhibition catalogue entitled ‘You Are the Hero’. They will advance through puzzles amid a gallery of characters bearing clues and symbols to decipher. This choice is a way of integrating a mediation experience into my artistic research, particularly for young audiences. By replaying a medieval standard: that of the Quest, this exhibition is also a way of paying tribute to the comics and video games of my childhood that shaped my imagination, my taste for history and my learning to draw.

‘Maistre Deü Jeu’ corresponds to ‘Maitre du jeu’ in the form of 12th-century Anjou French.