Mediterranean

Mucem

How does this new permanent exhibition tie in with the other permanent exhibition, “Populaire”, which opened last December?

Marie-Charlotte Calafat.

The two exhibitions are complementary: “Populaire?” showcases the museum’s collections, while “Méditerranées” addresses the complex and elusive subject of the Mediterranean world, which is what the public expects from Mucem. Both exhibitions place the collections at the heart of the museum, in all their diversity. Mucem is 10 years old, but has inherited French objects from the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires and European objects from the Musée de l’Homme. With the museum’s move to Marseille, new acquisitions have turned towards the Mediterranean. So we started with the Mucem’s “historical” collections, to show what they have to say about the Mediterranean. To make them easier to understand, we have supplemented, compared and contrasted them with recent acquisitions and deposits from other museums. This also allows us to question, in the Mediterranean context, the boundary between so-called “artistic” and “popular” objects, which is another point in common between the two permanent exhibitions. In the scenography, this idea is reflected in the evocation of historical museographic models, from the dense hanging of fine art museums in the late 18th and 19th centuries, to the different displays used in the history of ethnographic museums.

Mucem

The exhibition focuses on the construction of imaginary images of the Mediterranean: why did you choose to approach the project from this angle?

Raphaël Bories

Because that’s what struck us when we looked at our Mediterranean collections: for many of them, the image of the Mediterranean is not only very partial, but also highly influenced by fantasy and the imaginary. These sometimes stereotyped representations, the construction of which we have been showing since the 18th century, have not disappeared and still influence our view today. By showing these imaginations, we try to understand them, but above all to explain that they are inventions, not fixed realities. This is all the more important as they have been the subject of abuse and instrumentalization: the exhibition talks about this and strives to deconstruct them. These imaginaries have also influenced generations of artists and ethnologists, who have in turn helped to publicize and disseminate them, but also sometimes to call them into question. All of this is closely linked to a context in which European nations claimed the heritage of Greco-Roman antiquity, and embarked on the colonial conquest of the Mediterranean basin.

Mucem

Mucem’s collections are the heirs to this history, which combines fantasized antiquity and colonial domination?

Enguerrand Lascols

Not only, but to a large extent, for those relating to the Mediterranean. The folk art in Mucem’s collections is notably marked by the ancient model, central to artistic creation in Europe, as well as to the birth of national identities. Some of the objects collected around the Mediterranean by ethnologists, charged with studying human cultures in all their diversity, were collected in the context of colonization and the taste for the exoticism of the “Orient”. Of course, Mucem is not the only museum to preserve collections linked to these complex heritages: most do! What makes our approach so unique is that it questions and explains this context, with all its grey areas, and to do so, brings together collections that are not usually exhibited together: those of the museums formerly known as “fine arts” and “ethnography”. The aim is to show how the imaginations and heritages of the Mediterranean, which museums and their collections have helped to build, intersect, mix and influence each other.

Mucem

What do you consider to be the most outstanding works and objects on the tour?

Camille Faucourt

The exhibition features several life-size casts of important antique statues. They show how the artistic model of Antiquity was disseminated to artists and the general public alike. The cast of the caryatid from the Erechtheion in Athens, in addition to its monumental character, also bears witness to the appropriation of ancient heritage by nations and museums: the original is now in the British Museum. A large painting by Marseille-based painter Dominique Papety shows how 19th-century Greeks portrayed themselves as heirs to classical Greece, notably through the wearing of the fustanelle, a type of skirt inspired by ancient costume. The photographs and film of ethnologist Thérèse Rivière, taken in the Aurès region in the 1930s, are an exceptional testimony to the lives of the local people, to whom she was sincerely attached. For “Méditerranées”, we have acquired a painting by Jules Migonney depicting Algerian potters at work. It is exhibited alongside ceramics from our collections, collected in the field: the most remarkable works are each time linked to others, providing a better understanding of their context.

Mucem

Alongside historical objects, the exhibition also features works of contemporary art, notably by Théo Mercier… What do they tell us about today’s Mediterranean?

Hélia Paukner

First of all, they tell us that the imaginary worlds and heritage of the Mediterranean that are the subject of the exhibition continue to inspire artists, who continue to make use of them. In addition to their sensitive, aesthetic approach, their works also take a critical look at the ambiguities and tensions associated with the representations we have inherited. Théo Mercier has created several works for the exhibition around the themes of the manufacture of the gaze and heritage, whether ancient or ethnological. The artists’ work also gives voice to a plurality of current voices on the Mediterranean and its contemporary issues: the environment, migration, identities, colonial heritage, resource exploitation, gender. Throughout the exhibition, visitors can also hear the views of experts from all over the Mediterranean basin, as well as young people and eyewitnesses, on these contemporary phenomena. This multiplicity of approaches enables visitors to better grasp the plural and elusive nature of the Mediterranean, which is constructed above all through the eyes of those who imagine it.

Interview by Sandro Piscopo Reguieg (March 2024)