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Le jardin de Victor Hugo. Une pièce en plus pour Hauteville House? by Gérard AUDINET – Château de Bénouville
Victor Hugo’s garden. An extra room for Hauteville House?
At the risk of disappointing amateurs, the gardens at Hauteville House in Guernsey, where Victor Hugo lived in exile, have come to resemble an abandoned garden. But it was the abandon of a poet. And although hardly a feast of botanics, childhood memories and the echoes of the great master’s literary works still haunt the place. This poet’s and exile’s garden was also that of an artist, who transformed his home into a quite singular work of art. What links did he forge with this property? Can we interpret Victor Hugo’s garden in the same way we endeavour to interpret his house? And to do so, how can we reproduce the original garden, amidst a site that has incessantly been reshaped by the passing of time? Such are the questions we shall strive to answer, as the project to restore Hauteville House brings them back into the limelight.
Gérard Audinet
Gérard Audinet is a general heritage curator. After working for twenty years at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, where he acted as commissioner for a number of exhibitions, he became director of the Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris/Guernsey. Extremely committed to valorising collections via their study, their computerisation and their dissemination, he has also implemented a voluntarist exhibition policy. Today, his principal projects include an extension to the museum in Place des Vosges and a major development and restoration campaign at Hauteville House in Guernsey. Focusing his study on Victor Hugo’s relationships with the visual arts, he regularly publishes via his personal blog XIX-VPI.