Elsa Beaumont: Maison de Dieu

For thirty-eight years, La Maison de Dieu, located in the Cévennes, has welcomed people in need of a roof or wishing to live in a community. Here, no form of religion or religious practice is imposed. This communal house, founded on the principle of hospitality and non-judgment in a deliberately free and open space, is home to around eighty residents of different ages and backgrounds, sharing daily meals, meetings, resources, and tasks necessary for the proper functioning of the House. The residents are driven by a vitality built on the fringes of society and its tendencies to exclude. Embracing a wide diversity of life paths and carried wounds, this place becomes a shelter, a refuge, a space of freedom where everyone can take their time. Choosing to live here is thus a resource, a claimed stance, since returning to live elsewhere is too difficult or constraining for them. Capturing beings in suspension, whole despite the vicissitudes of life, the images in this series are as many proofs of the existence, strength, and intrinsic resources of each person encountered. The surrounding nature, abundant and untamed, dialogues with the bodies, each nourishing the other. Here, one is at the edge, in an in-between space, reinforced by the imposing and sometimes obscure presence of the house where beams of light pierce, revealing certain details like witnesses of an intimacy regained in a shared living space. These photographs reflect this place in resonance with Elsa Beaumont’s decision to settle in the Cévennes herself about ten years ago. Bearing witness to these unique forms of life is, for the photographer, a poetic and political act, allowing glimpses of answers to a society generally in crisis.