Good Mothers

Co-published by Mucem and Atelier EXB
344 pages
17 x 22 cm
ISBN 978-2-36511-456-1

Kathryn Weir, Hélia Paukner, and Enguerrand Lascols.

Enguerrand Lascols, Hélia Paukner, and Kathryn Weir.

In June 1831, an underwater volcanic eruption between Sicily, Tunisia, and Libya gave rise to a small, barren island made of ash. While sailors and residents of the nearby coasts feared the awakening of a monster, the new territory piqued the curiosity of scientists and the greed of European powers, who sought to claim its strategic position. The competition, however, was short-lived: six months later, the ephemeral island—named “Ferdinandea” by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies—sank back beneath the waves of the Mediterranean.

A video artist, visual artist, storyteller, and filmmaker, Clément Cogitore draws on this historical and geological phenomenon as the starting point for an empirical work of fiction. Based on historical research and speculative projections, his “Ferdinandea” series chronicles the emergence and disappearance of the volcanic island in a multimedia installation that brings together 16mm films, videos, photographs, and historical documents. The exhibition catalog, designed as an artist’s book, unfolds a visual narrative bordering on the dystopian, inviting the reader on a dreamlike and metaphorical journey. At the heart of the book, an unpublished short story by Tristan Garcia underscores the fictional nature of the work.

Co-published by Mucem and Gallimard
264 pages
19.5 x 25.5 cm
ISBN 9782073126856

A legendary figure in literature born in 1605, Don Quixote is at once a parody of a knight, a philosopher of the absurd, an inveterate dreamer, and an old man who has regressed to childhood, acting out the scenarios of his imagination “for real” and “for fun.” In the form of a “choose-your-own-adventure” book, this exhibition catalog revives the comic power of Cervantes’s work, inviting the reader to join in a whimsical journey from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Punctuated by twists and turns, these journeys will take the reader, through the artworks, to essays, and on to interviews with major contemporary artists and writers.

Edited by: Aude Fanlo and Hélia Pauker

With contributions by José Manuel Lucía Megías, Jean-Raymond Fanlo, Anne-Valérie Dulac, Alfonso Mateo-Sagasta, Danielle Perrot-Corpet, Florent Libral
And exclusive interviews with Abraham Poincheval, Pierre Menard & Christian Garcin, Terry Gilliam, Gaspard Hirshi, Boris Razon, Erri de Luca, Sande Zeig, Anthony Morel, Gérard Garouste, Izhar Patkin, Hassen Ferhani, Michael Kenna, Guillermo Peydró, Pilar Albarracín, Rob Davis…

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.”

Structured in two parts, like the exhibition, the catalog aims to provide an overview of the history of museum collections of antiquities and Mediterranean ethnography, delving deeper into certain exemplary cases through contributions from specialized art historians. This provides a better understanding of the dissemination—and political appropriation—of ancient models, and traces the footsteps of ethnographers in the field… Exclusive interviews with the contemporary artists participating in this project were also conducted.