Experience in Aubenas

Tekst i slike: Marianne Cvitkovic

Naša stalna suradnica, studentica Marianne Camille Srebrenka Cvitkovic s pariškoga sveučilišta IESA Art & Culture School, koja ovaj semestar provodi u Puli u sklopu ERASMUS + programa mobilnosti, u svom novom prilogu predstavlja praktikum, istraživanje i terensku nastavu iz područja upravljanja baštinom, koju je lani sa svojim francuskim kolegama odradila u dvorcu u Aubenasu.

Last year around October, my class and I visited a château in Aubenas.

As a practicum, our Master 1 project was a collaboration with a Heritage Management and Protection Group called VMF, who helps owners of historic homes and buildings. They give loans and aids, help them manage the building and guide the owners through the complicated administrative process to obtain all the certificates needed.

Every year, the VMF organization picks for our school a property for us to audit and make a study off, followed by an oral presentation of the audit. This practicum makes it possible for us to have a real-life application of our courses but is also a huge plus for the people who own the properties, as the free of charge audit study they receive would normally be up to 15.000 euros. As we all work on this project together for months, it is also an amazing bonding experience. 

The property is in the Ardèche department, in what French people call the Midi (“noon” but would translate better to “middle”). Although Ardèche is not quite in the south like Biarritz or Montpellier, the Midi is commonly accepted the South’s close cousin. Most people picture the south of France as this calm and charming place filled with beaches and retirees, the Midi is more a turmoil of mountains, hills and tempests and most of the time you can’t access properly any place if you’re cursed with carsickness. The region deals with what the locals call an “Ardéchois episode”, where after months of dry and heavy sun, the rain falls for sometimes days and the wind can be strong enough to destroy roofs and uproot trees. The Ardéchois episodes are extremely violent and block any circulation, so we were nervous to end up stuck in the middle of nowhere in a bloody tempest.

Making a plan to encourage people to visit the Hautségur Château also meant making sure they could access the Hautségur village…which would prove hard. The region has a very poor circulation network, meaning that some cities are barely accessible by train or community buses. Since a lot of villages are uphill and hard to access, it has a direct impact on the tourism and economy when the region has already suffered tremendously during the local industrial crisis in the 90’s.

To get to our destination, we had to take a train early in the morning, then a communal bus, then getting picked up by car and finally arriving only at 4pm. The time spent traveling was not so awful, as it was only the beginning of the school year so we used it to chat and mingle with each other: this expedition was also a kick-off or motivation trip for us. But we were scared to get caught in an Ardechois episode as it was the perfect season for it, and during our bus commute, the rain started falling incredibly heavy. 

The bus was doing all those turns to hike uphill and I could not properly read, else I would have thrown up. The only thing left for me to do was stare at the bay windows and observe the nature around us.

It might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I prefer nature when it’s raining or storming than when it’s sunny. I’ve loved visiting places with tropical weather as a kid, and I would go sit outside whenever a storm began. When I go to see my mom in the deep South West, I love to go drink my morning coffee on the beach when it’s gray and windy. Ardèche under storm was no exception. While I was of course a little scared of having our bus do a triple somersault, the woods covered in pines and stones were wonderful to observe under the aggressive rain, and the rumbling of the water on the roof of the bus was more a lullaby than a menace.

We got picked up at the bus station by locals who had befriended the owner of the Château at her arrival. They took us to Hautségur in their cars by small groups and on the way there, told us about their own experiences at the Château. Thanks to the financial aids, the owner had been able to restore and recreate a lot of the destroyed elements, but they were not able to received guests yet to sleep. The locals were so kind to host us, and for the three days we stayed there treated us like their grandkids. 

We finally arrived to the village of Aubenas, right next to the Château. We got to meet the owner and visited the property with her. Maybe because of her isolation or maybe by character, we realized very quickly she was a bit odd. If you did not stop her or directed the conversation elsewhere, she would go on about sorcery, exorcism and herbal medicines. She would even make some more better-behaved than me students very uncomfortable when she would ask them questions about their own spiritual beliefs. I like a good nettle tea and I’m not closed to supernatural tales but it took everything in me to not be rude during the trip, especially since we were wasting working time to listen to her completely losing it. But since the property was renowned for its many paranormal activities, it seemed natural to find such an owner.

It was not the only exhausting aspect of the trip. Everything was cold and wet; we were tired from traveling for so long and we did not have access to our thousand coffees a day we would usually get at the school coffee machine. But still, we were very happy to share all those moments together, no matter how tiring they were. Some of us even did yardwork to help around: a colleague and I moved and carried rocks for a full afternoon. There was something so strange to move around casually in this 15th century property, where everything was old and used and dark. We kept chatting and laughing together, partly to shake off the uncanny feeling we would get from the owner and the spooky atmosphere. 

The first night, we all went to have dinner at the local Italian restaurant and debrief the day. This would be the only meal that would not be a pic-nic so we used this opportunity to relax and just enjoy the moment. Then we all went to our separate places full of pasta to sleep.

The three days we spent there really created a strong bond between all the students. Even though we were mostly only girls (there was only one boy in the Heritage and Tourism master degree of our school), we were very diverse and different from each other. I had to leave for my Erasmus before the oral presentation of the audit, so I never got to finish the project with the rest of my class. Still, I’m very happy I got to discover Ardèche with them. On the way back in the train, students passed beers, slices of bread and cans of pâté around. I still got the videos of us eating and laughing and I watch them from time to time.

It was the first school trip where I actually got closer to other students and genuinely enjoyed being altogether. And I have promised myself I would come back to the region one day, just to explore the nature a little more, hopefully without any tempest.