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.

Alexandra Catiere’s life path, from the former Soviet Union to the United States and then to France, both scorns borders and testifies to her striving for universality. The photographer has made timelessness a salient feature of an oeuvre that revives photography’s humanistic tradition in a virtuoso capturing of sensation and atmosphere. Never settling simply for portrait, still life or reportage, Alexandra uses the camera to express her empathy with human nature and, most of all, with life itself. Born in Minsk, Belarus, Alexandra Catiere moved to Moscow in 2000 where she discovered photography. In 2003, she went to New York to train at the International Center of Photography (ICP), the school where her vision was forged. Two years later, she joined Irving Penn’s studio and became a Fine Art Printer, a formative apprenticeship that honed her mastery of the view camera and silver printing.