Submerged house is an artwork

ALTHOUGH it looks like a hapless victim of the rising waters, the submerged house is – as readers Jackie Marshall and Kevin Raymond said on Facebook – part of an art installation on the Loire, outside Nantes, Pays-de-la-Loire.

Called La Maison dans La Loire, by Jean-Luc Courcoult, it was created in 2007 as a facsimile of the Maison du Port in Lavau-sur-Loire and sited outside the town on the river. However, the house was badly damaged by the tides at Lavau.

It was decided to restore the house, which is made of sealed concrete panels, and once completed it was taken by barge to be resited at Couëron in 2012, where it is now firm on the river bed with the tide rising and falling alongside it each day.

In all, 29 artworks are sited along 60km of the Loire from Nantes to Saint-Nazaire and they can all be seen easily, with a special river cruise organised in the summer months.

They vary from Angela Bulloch’s British-style zebra crossing, complete with Belisha beacons, to Lilian Bourgeat’s super-sized tape measure and Huang Yong Ping’s sea serpent skeleton. Details http://www.estuaire.info/en/

*The Pays-de-la-Loire is the subject of our four-page Regional Spotlight in December’s issue of The Connexion.

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