Ceci N'est Pas Une Ombre
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Wood was new territory for Frédéric Gironde. “Wood? I didn’t know how,” he admits. So when we handed him chips from DARA and complete freedom, he spent eighteen months working it out.
His secret is almost as old as the tree itself: antique linen and hemp sheets, some dating back to the French Revolution, made while DARA was already growing. Blended with DARA’s fibres, they create a paper that brings together two materials from the same centuries.
“These two materials were never meant to meet. In the end, we made them meet.”
The result is a range of papers, from an almost transparent 80gsm sheet to Peau de Chêne, the heaviest of all, made entirely from DARA’s pulp.
In the film
- Holding a letter signed by Louis XIV, and being asked to make paper to match it.
- Paper dyed with Margaux wine that changes colour in twenty seconds.
- Why failed sheets can become his most precious ones.
Well-kept textile paper can last for centuries. DARA’s story is only beginning.
The world’s first, and to this day one of the finest, examples of cartography: the art and science of mapping.
The project began in 1667, when the Sun King, Louis XIV, and his First Minister Colbert were revolutionising France in many ways. Science and the arts went hand in hand, and there are few better examples than this monumental production, which took over a century from gestation to completion.
They wanted precise maps to secure coasts, plan defences, improve taxation and better manage the kingdom’s provinces. To that end Jean-Baptiste Colbert, acting on the Sun King’s mandate, famously asked the newly formed Académie des sciences to produce a more accurate map than had hitherto been made. He left the details to them.
Enter Giovanni Domenico Cassini, the King’s astronomer, an Italian polymath recruited to head the new Observatoire de Paris, which would become a critical player in the accurate measurement of France. He worked with France’s finest scientists to develop the triangulation method of measuring distance. It worked so well that, on seeing the new and significantly reduced area of his kingdom in 1682, Louis is said to have quipped: “You have cost me more territory than my enemies.”
The project took over a century and four generations of the Cassini family to complete. Wars, aged and very young kings, budgetary constraints and the little matter of the French Revolution all played their part in delaying it.
Meticulous measurement and magnificent detailed engravings, all coded to carry the maximum amount of topographical information, required France’s finest engravers and printers. They were employed by royal order, mostly by Louis XIV’s great-grandson and successor, Louis XV.
Louis XV also tapped fifty of his rich friends on the shoulder to finance the work, establishing the Association des cinquante. Their seal, stamped on some of the Cartes Cassini in our collection, reads: MUNIFICENTIA REGIS OPTIMI · CIVES L CONFEC[ERUNT] — “By the generosity of the best of kings, fifty citizens made this.”
It took until 1815, under Napoleon’s orders, for the project to be finally completed.
Along with the map of France created in 1744, which served as the basis for the 180 provincial maps, we have the complete set of 181. Our set is of particular rarity in that the maps are all hand-coloured. The practice was started by Marie-Antoinette, who found them too monochromatic, so rivers, forests and towns were all given coloured prominence.
Our collection, in 28 beautifully bound leather volumes from around 1820, was brilliantly designed to be both portable and durable. Each large map was cut into 21 pieces, individually glued to a hessian backing, which allowed them to be folded without damage to the maps themselves.
OCTARR is celebrating this great achievement alongside another of Louis XIV and Colbert’s achievements: the reorganisation of French forestry management, which led to DARA, our magnificent 350-year-old oak, living on in many future projects.
On 6 April, at the close of the inaugural Classic Cello International Competition in London, a 14-year-old Korean cellist named Jung A Kim walked onto the stage at the Royal College of Music and received a prize that no competition had ever offered before.
€50,000. And the loan of an 18th-century Italian cello worth half a million dollars.
Jung A Kim is, in Nathan’s own words, “one of the most amazing talents I have ever heard.” The cello she received, crafted circa 1770 and believed to have been commissioned by the Medici, will be hers for a minimum of two years, maintained and insured throughout her tenure by world-renowned luthier Florian Leonhard MBE.
Nathan, who was himself the youngest Principal Cello of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at 19, has spent more than 40 years with this instrument. Hearing it pass to Jung A Kim, he said simply:
“It is in great hands.”
This is what OCTARR was built for.
The 350-year-old “Arbre Remarquable” French oak from the Forêt d’Écouves, planted by order of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and which we have named Dara, will officially launch later this year, in October in London.
Her first children are equally remarkable: beautiful pre-industrial, non-chemically treated, handmade sheets of 50 x 70 cm paper from the brilliant and creative papetier Frédéric Gironde of Ruscombe Paper Mill in Bordeaux.
Her first grandchild was unveiled at a private dinner at the Kunstmuseum, which houses the world’s oldest public art collection, dating back to the same time as Dara herself.
Harto and the Sigg Art Foundation
The Sigg Art Foundation, a wonderful initiative by the Swiss entrepreneur and philanthropist Pierre Sigg, aided by his daughter Maurine, supports and promotes a number of cutting-edge artists. One of them is the Barcelona-based Harto, with whom OCTARR is developing a close and deep working relationship.
On a night which also unveiled a massive sculpture by someone extremely well known, but who must for the time being remain a secret, Harto presented the first work in a ten-work series, Memoria Viva, entitled Latent Memory.
It is printed on OCTARR’s Dara paper.
The concert itself was an all-French affair, drawn from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: a repertoire as demanding as it is luminous.
We open with Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane (Gypsy), written a century ago for the great female violin virtuoso Jelly d’Aranyi, and fiendishly difficult. Transposed to cello, it edges toward the unplayable. And yet Jung A Kim, our pocket-rocket prodigy, plays it as though it were written for her all along.
This first excerpt puts the spotlight on the cello’s G string. On a violin, the G is the lowest string in the instrument’s register. But the cello goes deeper: a C string, tuned a fifth below the G. In fact, every string on the cello sits a full octave below its violin counterpart, which is precisely why hearing Tzigane reborn down here, in this deeper register, feels like meeting an old piece for the first time.
In 1669, Colbert designed a French silviculture system to reorganise and improve French forestry, especially oak for the navy: a programme so patient it is still shaping forests today. The Chêne de Morat, one of France’s protected “Arbres Remarquables”, was one of those trees, left standing for over three centuries so the French National Forestry Office could study how oaks behave over time.
When it was reaching the end of its life, Jean-Luc bought it, and did something that had never been done before: he made wine barrels from a single, almost four-centuries-old tree.
“A 350-year-old oak doesn’t just look different. It ages wine differently.”
Softer tannins, a silkier texture, and aromas no younger tree can produce.
Where our own project begins
OCTARR’s DARA project takes the roughly 80% of a felled Arbre Remarquable that the cooperage industry can’t use, and turns it into handmade paper and artworks, starting with a tree named Dara.
The goal: give these ancient oaks another 300 years of life. It’s this paper that DARArtNouveau in Brussels is built around.