Art Book from the “Populaire?” Exhibition
This art book, developed in close collaboration between the museum’s curators and editorial team, invites readers to delve into the Mucem’s collections and interpret them in a new light. To highlight the collection’s diversity, three hundred selected items will be presented. Three hundred objects, works of art, or documents—sometimes very distant from one another chronologically and in terms of type—but which share thematic or visual similarities. Their arrangement throughout the book and their juxtaposition on each spread sometimes give rise to playful moments, but above all, to narratives. And each time, they pose questions to the reader: What are their uses? What do they represent? What are they made of? What is a “rat-de-cave”? A “diable de Bessans”? Could it be that an oven and a loft vent share similar shapes? What are a fake beard, an ad for fly swatters, a crystal ball, and a miniature coffin doing in a museum?
Comparisons between objects offer clues; captions serve as keys. It is up to the reader to, in turn, unravel the narrative threads woven from these chain-like associations. For our most curious readers, we’ll reveal that the book’s structure was inspired by an amusing literary device called “concatenaion .” Concatenation is a series of anadiploses—in other words, “a repetition”—where the last word of one sentence is used as the first word of the next. So as not to scare off other readers, we’ll also tell them that it’s simpler than it seems: it’s the same principle as the nursery rhyme “Three Little Kittens.”
Mucem Publications
17 x 24 cm
Hardcover, Japanese-style binding
18 euros
300 images
979-10-92708-26-4
