The Mamelles Room

— Fontevraud (49) — 2016
Designer: Métalobil with Barreau Charbonnet
Client: Royal Abbey of Fontevraud
Location: Romanesque refectory

Inhabiting the Romanesque refectory of Fontevraud Abbey differently is not particularly complicated because when you enter it, unless someone tells you otherwise, the first use you imagine is not fish smoking. It is very easy to picture this place as ultimately a sort of giant still where oils, spirits, and liqueurs were distilled by large, erudite, ruddy monks, their livers at the edge of their lips. The first time, the analogy with animality, specifically the Pangolin, strikes you. This roof made of cones topped with small turrets with scales running the wrong way invites you to look at it upside down, and upside down, it brings to mind that performance hall in Marseille, Le Silo, which the locals there, with their verve, call the mamelles room. It’s amusing because this image summons another, that of the statue depicting Romulus and Remus beneath the she-wolf’s teats, the founding myth of the ancient city, perhaps even of the ideal city; the two cherubs feasting in immense pleasure under the beast’s bosom. So, when all these ingredients are jumbled in your little brain and you enter this magical, highly structured space, the negative of the roof’s learned geometry, and you are, like those large monks you wouldn’t have been surprised to encounter, somewhat alcoholic and nostalgic for the breast (maternal?), the image of the inverted bell towers embedded in the chimneys at whose ends a marvel of nectar* would bead, overwhelms you. It becomes imperative to savor it!