Popular?

The aim of this permanent exhibition is to present the collection in all its diversity. It brings together the historical holdings of the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires, the European collections of the Musée de l’Homme and those acquired since the early 2000s, with a view to opening up to the Mediterranean and the contemporary world.

On the first floor of the building, the Mucem’s permanent exhibition is designed as a space for discovery, highlighting the profoundly human character of the objects and testimonies that make up this collection. It presents what makes up the museum’s “material”, it bears witness to the semiotic (what objects say about the society in which they were produced) and aesthetic character of this collection, and makes it possible to read all the stories that led to the acquisitions, the life paths of the objects, what motivated their entry into the museum’s reserves, then and now.

The general itinerary follows broad categories borrowed from the vocabulary of the history of arts and techniques (“painting”, “sculpture”, “metal arts”, “ceramics”, etc.). A journey that brings out the particularities of the Mucem collection, breaking with the usual hierarchy between fine art and popular art. We thus move from objects expected in a museum (such as paintings, ex-votos, icons, etc.) to more surprising items (such as decorated beehive doors), and from objects familiar to the general public to more unexpected or even mysterious items.

Alongside the 1,200 objects and documents from the Mucem’s historical collections, or those more recently acquired by the museum, an immersive digital mediation system evokes, through a selection of objects, the idea of “popular culture” that permeates its collections.

Le parcours du Collectionneur

Throughout the “Populaire?” exhibition, a multi-sensory tour for the general public, accessible to the visually and mentally impaired, punctuates the visit.

It’s a sensitive, poetic device made up of 7 stations in a retro universe, inviting visitors to discover and handle the collection of a fictional character, the eccentric collector. Travel souvenirs, films, masks… as the character gleans his finds, everyone can discover or rediscover the popular imagination associated with everyday objects that have become emblematic, a sort of “Proust’s madeleines” that awaken emotions, sensations and memories.

Design and production: Chouette fluo and Esprit Volume