Arc-et-Senans

"Confronting the architecture of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux is no easy task. Robert Schad’s work is commensurate with this great theatre of events, as Ledoux defined the Royal Saltworks in the 18th century. He wrote: ""Taste is found wherever the purity of line is present; it is found wherever the painter of nature breathes the spirit of life.""
The lines drawn by Robert Schad’s sculptures breathe the spirit of life. Scattered in prestigious places in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, they are telluric totems emblematic of the richness of the territory’s heritage and nature.
Latou, Balug, Monse, like benevolent guardians, take their place on either side of the Grotto, the entrance to the Saltworks, symbol of the state of nature.
These monumental sculptures will accompany us for two years, two essential years in the history of the Royal Saltworks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
In 2022, the Immense Circle will open, completing the existing heritage semicircle with a landscaped enclosure, thus materialising Claude Nicolas Ledoux’s project.
In 2023, in the Berne Est, the historic site of the exploitation of igneous salt, restructured in the 1930s to house the Besançon stud farm, a theatre with nearly 600 seats and recording studios will open. In a world fragmented by the effect of a virus that isolates and compartmentalizes, in a world where moving around becomes impossible, dangerous or suspicious, the need for a place of conservation, transmission and production of value for the arts and artists is a necessary project.
Ledoux was an artist who believed in the ordering of a world whose grandeur he tried to express through the purity of its forms, a creator of universes where architecture orders the chaos of society, restores natural balance, repairs the inequalities of situations, soothes tensions and lets the arts flourish.
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux imagined this world in his ideal town of Chaux, at the break of his century: ""It is a world isolated from the world, it is a people who develop and germinate all the seeds of the earth, like the bee that sticks from flower to flower.""
At the Royal Saltworks, by 2023, we will propose, based on the work of landscape architect Gilles Clément, a biodiversity laboratory and a school of planetary gardening illustrated by the 10 hectares of the Immense Circle and the gardens in motion.

With the Saline Royale Academy, we will create the most complete and prestigious international catalogue of filmed master classes in classical and baroque music, thus safeguarding the exceptional heritage represented by the richness and diversity of the teachings and techniques of the greatest masters, in the face of the standardisation of playing and styles.
We are working to extend this project, which focuses on written music, essentially Western, to the world of oral transmission, popular or learned, from the East, the Far East or Africa.
In collaboration with the start-up company Iconem, in order to safeguard, study and digitally enhance the world’s heritage, the Royal Salt Works is going to metamorphose the West Bern. 1,000 m2
transformed into a digital immersive space to travel through the most remarkable sites of humanity, particularly those in danger or inaccessible.
The Saltworks will become the heart of a network of more than 30 countries where architects and archaeologists will collaborate to safeguard the trace of a threatened or destroyed heritage and will be trained, thanks to the action of Iconem, in the techniques of digital recording, capture and restitution.
Thus, with the sophisticated means of technology and the talent of the artists who accompany us, we will transmit the heritage that has been entrusted to us in its diversity, in its beauty, in the supreme grandeur of Art, as André Malraux would have said.

Hubert Tassy
Director General of the Saline royale
www.salineroyale.com"