Hall 1 focuses on The Thief’s Journal a book that recounts Genet’s years of running away, drifting, desertion and theft, and which is bathed in the light of Spain. The exhibition begins with the circumstances of Genet’s birth: the original and heart-breaking letters from Genet’s mother, when abandoning her son against her will to public assistance have been recently recovered. A wall of images and archives outlines the biographical journey of Genet through the social services, child psychiatry, the courts, the army, the military justice and health systems, the prisons and finally, the central intelligence agency– tracing the movement that led Genet from public assistance to the cells where he began writing.

Documents include the very first letter written by Genet to the public assistance authorities, his runaway records and the report of the psychiatrist at the military prison at Fort Saint Nicolas in Marseille (opposite Fort Saint Jean at the Mucem where the exhibition takes place) where Genet was incarcerated then tried for desertion in 1938.

A work by Ernest Pignon-Ernest, who exceptionally agreed to install it in the interior of the exhibition, pays tribute to Genet’s early years

Hall 2 ushers visitors into the theatre of Genet through what remains both one of the most important plays of our time and one of the greatest theatre scandals of the twentieth century: the Parisian production of The Screens.

When Roger Blin and Jean-Louis Barrault staged the play at the Odéon-Théâtre de France, it had only been four years since the end of the Algerian War. And although never specifically mentioned by name, the drama was nonetheless perceived as an ode to the Algerian revolution. Costume sketches created by André Acquart, photographs of the production and the demonstrations in front of the Odéon, testimonies filmed by Jean-Louis Barrault and Maria Casarès, who played the Mother, surround one of the very first versions of the manuscript as well as the working copies of Roger Blin and Genet. The Screens was the culmination of Genet’s theatrical trajectory before his disappearance and escape from the literary scene that lasted twenty-five years.

The third hall is dedicated to the to the final phase of Genet’s life, lasting fifteen years: his support of the Black Panthers in the United States, and above all, the Palestinians. These experiences provided the poetic material for his final great work discovered in the hotel room where Genet died and which was perhaps the happiest of all his books, Prisoner of Love. The manuscripts of La Sentence and Prisoner of Love, presented for the first time along with brochures from the Black Panther Party and the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), are framed by two walls, one of photographs and the other of videos. Here reporting on the Palestinian camps in Jordan by the photographer Bruno Barbey in the 1970s for the review Zoom with commentary by Genet is opposite televised reports on the massacres of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila. There is also video work by Carole Roussopoulos showing Genet reading a text in support of Angela Davis, as well as testimonies from those close to him including Leïla Shahid, with whom Genet, the first western witness to the massacres, entered the Shatila camp. A photograph by the artist Didier Morin, showing Genet’s grave in the small Spanish cemetery of Larache, in northern Morocco, on the outer edge of the western world where the poet of the century’s last revolutions found his final refuge, concluding the Genet adventure.

Lastly, a projection room offers visitors in its entirety of one of the very rare filmed interviews that Genet granted: shot in Greece by Antoine Bourseiller shortly before his death, Genet reflects on the major episodes of his life: his childhood, the Mettray penal colony, his relationships with Giacometti, the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. It provides a recapitulation in images and in words of the entire exhibition itinerary.