Some homes become museums. Others resist. They keep the air of the person who lived there, the shape of their habits, the silence after their voice has gone. Maison Gainsbourg, at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil in Paris, belongs to that second category.
With 5bis, Charlotte Gainsbourg makes her photography debut by returning to the house where her father, Serge Gainsbourg, lived for decades. The exhibition, unveiled as part of the 57th Rencontres d’Arles, is on view at La Galerie du Cloître in Arles from July 6 to September 6, 2026, before travelling to Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Paris on September 24. Supported by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello and curated by Matthieu Humery, the project turns a private address into a quiet act of remembrance.
For the series, Gainsbourg returned to 5 bis Rue de Verneuil shortly before the house opened to the public as Maison Gainsbourg. Working alone with a Hasselblad camera, she photographed the interiors as they remained, creating more than twenty previously unseen images that preserve the rooms in their last moments before becoming part of public memory.
That timing gives the work its emotional charge. These are not photographs of a museum. They are photographs of a home at the instant before transformation. A room still carrying intimacy, but already approaching display. Objects remain in place. Light passes over surfaces. Absence becomes almost physical.
The project could easily have become sentimental, but its power lies in restraint. Charlotte Gainsbourg does not dramatise the house. She lets it speak through fragments: empty rooms, familiar objects, quiet corners, and traces of daily life that seem ordinary until they are understood as evidence of someone no longer there.
In that sense, 5bis is both a family archive and a farewell. It preserves the private world of Serge Gainsbourg before that world becomes cultural heritage, before visitors enter, before intimacy is reorganised into history. The photographs hold the fragile interval between mourning and institution.
The exhibition is accompanied by a Saint Laurent Editions publication, also titled 5bis, released in several collectible editions, including limited versions featuring silver gelatin prints and handwritten texts by the artist.
