Chantal Royant works glass at the Galerie Casanova in Dinard and opens it for the Savoir-Faire fortnight. The round of forty-five minutes passes glass sculptures, art installations and delicate jewellery. The artist was born at Lanester and carried the Studio Glass movement’s experimental method back to this coast. Her forms answer the sea and the Breton landscapes, and the shifting light of the Breton shore that the material keeps transforming.
Region: Brittany
ESAT Les Genêts d’Or opens its workshops, Plabennec
The Établissement et Service d’Accompagnement par le Travail at Plabennec opens its workshops and lets the workers do the talking. The trades shown are groundskeeping, horticulture, printing, brewing and packing. Each is explained by the ESAT workers themselves, who set out their savoir-faire. The jobs are held under adapted conditions by workers with disabilities, and what the visits raise goes to the Fondation du Patrimoine de Bretagne.
Anatole Le Braz, with Hussön and Lefondeur
An evening given to Anatole Le Braz, his work and his legacy. Xavier Hussön, who illustrated the temporary exhibition shown alongside, sits with the novelist Gérard Lefondeur, who brings the writer back through his investigations. They take in the writer, the collector and the Brittany he described, drawing on archives, contemporary art and the imagination. The Cercle Celtique de Malestroit performs at the close, and admission is free.
Maison Brieuc: the biscuiterie workshops, Yffiniac
Maison Brieuc opens its production workshops at Yffiniac and walks visitors along the route its ingredients take, from raw material to finished product. Pâtissiers, carameliers and confituriers are at work as the group passes. What comes off these lines is the Breton repertoire of palet breton and kouign amann, Confibreizh and spécialités au caramel, worked au beurre salé with sel de Guérande. The visit is offered as a matter of transparency.
Visite guidée de la Maison à Pondalez, Morlaix
The Maison à Pondalez is a timber-framed house of the early sixteenth century, a piece of Morlaix civil architecture. Its plan is the style « à lanterne »: one tall central space open through several floors, a monumental wooden vis staircase, and the suspended walkways, the pondalez, linking the storeys. A guide of the Musée de Morlaix leads the visit through rooms holding its flax collections. The house is classée Monument Historique.
Contes et histoires du pays at the Ferme d’Antan
Angélique leads her listeners from one end of the Écomusée de la Ferme d’antan to the other, telling the contes et légendes du pays. The figures she summons are the korrigans, the lavandières de la nuit and the croquemitaine. The telling moves on foot through the farm village at Le Saint Esprit des Bois, in Plédéliac. It is one evening of the fifth Minutes Bleues, the Côtes-d’Armor festival staged in the blue light of dawn and dusk.
L’enceinte carolingienne de Paner, Saint-Tugdual
Guides walk visitors over the Paner enclosure at Saint-Tugdual, where the archaeology service has just closed a second consecutive summer of excavation. What they set out has not been published anywhere: the findings of that season, taken trench by trench. N. Coustet-Larroque and J-P Eludut lead the visit, which leaves from the Place de la mairie. The Carolingian enclosure itself is the subject, and the reading of it is the part that has changed.
Cendrea Nature: wood-ash laundry soap, Saint-Pabu
Cendrea Nature needs only two things to make its cleaning products: wood ash and rainwater. Bruno Lecoeur brought back the ecological, Finistère-made laundry soap his forebears washed with, and sells it under that name. The visit explains the method and then hands it over, with an initiation to making laundry soap from wood ash. The session is open from fourteen years up, and the takings go to the Fondation du Patrimoine de Bretagne.
AGDE artisan cannery, Plabennec
The AGDE workshop runs a small cannery at Plabennec, the only agri-food project of its kind in Brittany, and its line doubles as a route back into paid work. Visitors follow the jars through the kitchen, sweet and savoury side by side: pâtés, rillettes, jams and prepared meals. The posts on that line are learned by some thirty-five people a year, on the way to a lasting job. A tasting of the jars closes the round, with tea, coffee or apple juice.
Farm cheesemaking at Au Pré de la Terre
Au Pré de la Terre is run by three people at Plélan-le-Grand: Stéphanie on the family holding, Kévin setting up his own operation, and Paul. Every litre from their Breton cows is processed on site into no fewer than six cheeses, plus butter, skyr and Gwell, the dairy product particular to the Pie Noire breed. The herd grazes year round and grass is at the heart of the system, on a farm certified organic. The two-hour visit closes with a tasting.