Reopening of the Château d’Eau – Toulouse

Reopening of the Château d’Eau Gallery, on Saturday, November 22, 2025.

On Saturday, November 22, the Château d’Eau is about to reopen its doors after a year and a half of construction.  The visitor path of this reference institution dedicated to author photography has been completely renewed and enlarged with a new wing built under an arch of the Pont-Neuf.  Visitors will now be able to discover and appropriate the entire site of the Water Tower, including its gardens. Both the library and the temporary exhibition spaces have also been redefined, offering a more readable and fluid journey and allowing access to the public throughout the year.

Inaugural exhibition
Sophie Zénon
The Humus of the world
from November 22, 2025 to March 08, 2026

With the exhibition L’humus du monde, Sophie Zénon offers a reading of her work in the light of the atypical architecture of the Château d’Eau characterized by a circular path on two floors and a gallery.   This so particular physiognomy of the place inspired the artist to create a scenography that spans the metaphor of the circle, evoking for her the cycle of life and death. Conceived as a journey through a work intimately linked to a life’s journey, the exhibition is divided into three chapters covering the three spaces of the Château d’Eau and brings together more than a hundred works created over twenty years, resulting from about twenty corpora as well as unpublished creations created for the exhibition.

From the intimate to the great story, L’humus du monde thus draws a portrait of this artist fascinated by beauty and dread, inhabited by questions of memory and the passage of time. Universal subjects on which Sophie Zénon returns each time with a new approach, both thematic and formal. From these experimental practices came organic, vibrant and poetic works guided by the notions of fragility, impermanence and breath of life.