Du Quai Branly Research Articles

Влияние Жака Ширака на культурную политику Франции

The article treats the influence of Jacques Chirac, President of the Fifth Republic, on the French cultural policy during his first and second presidencies. It also analyses the president’s cultural preferences and their reflec-tion in the country’s cultural policy. The main attention is paid to the largest projects for the creation of new cul-tural institutions (The Musée du Quai Branly, Louvre-Lens, Louvre Abu Dhabi), and Chirac’s contribution to the conception of these projects as well as their implementation. The issues of the development of Chirac’s ideas about cultural equality and the so-called “primitive” art and their formation from the time of his leadership as the mayor of Paris to his second presidential term are touched upon. The article analyzes the testimonies of the president’s associates that speak about Chirac’s role in shaping the cultural and political course of his era.

A Museum of Black Civilizations in the Contemporary World: In conversation with Hamady Bocoum

A Museum of Black Civilizations in the Contemporary World: In conversation with Hamady Bocoum

Toward New Feminist Aesthetics

Toward New Feminist Aesthetics

Scholars and the Politics of International Art Restitution

Almost every week brings news of another major European museum agreeing to return looted art. Since the 2000s we have grown somewhat accustomed to the headlines describing a ceremonial return to its original owners of a painting looted in the Holocaust, a process that took decades to develop and was initially met with considerable resistance in the art world and in the countries where this art was displayed.1 In the past few years, however, building in part on the perceived success of Holocaust art restitution but also on the increased visibility and impact of national and global social movements demanding racial justice and institutional decolonisation, major international museums have come under ever stronger pressure to return art looted as part of colonial occupations. Perhaps the most organised of the current campaigns is the campaign to return the so-called ‘Benin Bronzes’ – a vast collection of various artifacts looted from the Kingdom of Benin (in today's Nigeria) and dispersed across major international museums, most prominently the British Museum in London, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, among others. Since 2020, a number of museums have pledged to return their holdings of Benin Bronzes and restitute them to Nigeria, where a major new museum is being built to display them in Benin City. All of this activity has also reenergised perhaps the most famous case for restitution – the movement to return the Parthenon ‘Elgin’ marbles from the British Museum to the Acropolis in Athens.

Restitution vs. Retention: Reassessing Discourses on the African Cultural Heritage

AbstractIn order to reappraise discourses on the restitution vs. retention of Africa’s cultural heritage, Eyssette examines the Musée du Quai Branly (France), the AfricaMuseum (Belgium), the British Museum (UK), and the Humboldt Forum (Germany) as one representative spectrum for analysis showing the mutual imbrications of their changing strategies and practices. After detecting biases in retentionist arguments on security, accessibility, law, and ethics, Eyssette stresses symmetrical shortcomings in restitutionist discourses on provenance research and the instrumentalization of heritage for economic gains or post-colonial rebranding. The conclusion determines whether these four institutions are retentionists, rhetorical restitutionists, or truly reformed restitutionists.

JOHN MAWURNDJUL'S ART IN PARIS

abstract The Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac (MQBJC) in Paris includes a commissioned ceiling mural by Australian artist John Mawurndjul. Neither the identity of the artist nor the cultural meaning of the work features strongly as part of the visitor experience for this work. Such interpretation is, in general, pushed to the margins in the museum's permanent exhibits. Paradoxically, the temporary exhibits are treated differently. The paper details how the power of John Mawurndjul's art is developed in relation to social activities on his own country as well as his cross‐cultural engagements with the broader art world. Cultural meaning and strong principles of aesthetics are developed through this creativity. The paper presents these insights as interpretational possibilities for Mawurndjul's mural and questions whether an avowed museum of world arts can continue to ignore the development of a more cross‐cultural definition of aesthetics and a relational approach to develop and interpret its permanent exhibits.

The Era of Endless Repatriation: Respectful Relationality and the Reconfiguration of Colonial Authority

Originally given in the form of two lectures at the Musée du quai Branly, this essay explores the often fraught politica of repatriation in a Canadian context. It suggests that we have moved into an era in which repatriation, understood in this alternate sense as the decentring of settler museum authority and the recognition of Indigenous sovereign rights, is simply unavoidable. This is not just about a “reckoning” with prior histories of colonial appropriation. Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that the structures of settler colonialism themselves are shifting (cf: Kauanui 2016), and museums in such contexts will need to engage with the idea of repatriation as such, as a social phenomenon that entails transformation over the longue durée instead of a set of individual, case by case incidents. Drawing on the author’s experiences as an anthropologist and a curator working with Indigenous Nations on the Northwest Coast of what is now called Canada, the essay ultimately argues that museums will arrive at stronger, more productive relationships with First Peoples by accepting the ongoing reality of repatriations. Indeed, it suggests that it is only through collaboration that genuinely decentres museum authority and foregrounds Indigenous sovereignty that museums will be able to develop genuinely future-oriented and responsible practices.

The Evolution of Chinese View of Death: Focusing on the Zhizha Art Exhibition at Musée Du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac

The Evolution of Chinese View of Death: Focusing on the Zhizha Art Exhibition at Musée Du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac

Afropolitanist Return and Circulation

In June 2020, Congolese-born activist Mwazulu Diyabanza and five others attempted to remove a nineteenth-century Chadian funeral post from the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac. Diyabanza would go on to enact this type of protest in two more European museums before the end of the year. He and his fellow protestors proclaimed a collective European and North American complicity and were tried by French courts for group theft of an object of cultural heritage. As the reader likely knows, the cultural heritage here in question was France's, whose appeal for the items in part mirrors Amanda M. Maples's Afropolitanist considerations in her First Word. These items have indeed been resocialized, but should at the very least be accessible to their communities of origin as they speak to different geographies in multiple languages (Maples 2020).The year 2020 and its deluge of surprises left us with small consolations: much of the African continent emerged from the COVID epidemic relatively unscathed. However, the virus' ramifications have already begun affecting sub-Saharan African countries, spurring legitimate concerns about vaccine equity. These dynamics undoubtedly mirror the stakes and discourse that affect sub-Saharan African countries and cultural institutions and only strengthen the case for financial support. Dr. Memel Kassi notes the disparity in the circulation of artwork among the United States, Europe, and the African continent in her contribution to this discussion, and I join her in a call for financial commitments from North American institutions. A model for comanagement, in the form of a fixed-term rental deposit, complements Maples's call for North American museums to properly investigate provenance and inform the placement of these works of art.However, this task cannot be completed unilaterally. Much of the cataloguing and provenance research, the investigations into cultural heritage and exercises that advance institutional capabilities in North American and European institutions, remains inaccessible to the majority of museum professionals on the African continent. Adopting a significant “role in a politics of cultural action” is an exercise that in and of itself demands boundless adaptability. Efforts such as the controversial Humboldt Museum's “Humboldt Lab Tanzania,” with support from TURN (The Fund for Artistic Cooperation between Germany and African Countries), engaged scholars in the sites of origin of selected pieces and the store rooms for the very sites where the artifacts are held. Such initiatives, though still insufficient, are essential to active cultural reengagement around these very artifacts.I also echo Christine Mullen Kreamer's reflection on the distinctions between process and outcome, and the manners in which both can be useful material exercises for developing new dynamics of equity between North American and African institutions. Given these histories of exclusion and the concerns around ensuring that artifact return follows and instills “sustainable development,” the hazards—legal, geopolitical, financial, emotional—demand novel modes of reasoning across institutions and geographies. Following Kreamer's question and reiterating Strother's own, we must ask how North American institutions can work toward outcomes that won't replicate the very imbalanced hierarchies of power that have produced the current complications around assessing the merits of return.North American institutional partnerships cannot be limited to North American peers. As Maples measuredly points out, the burden of devising best practice guidelines cannot be shouldered by one institution alone. The same logic extends continentally. Travel and knowledge-sharing must be made active and transparent and cannot exclude the very professionals who will themselves ensure conservation and curation for the objects that will be repatriated or circulated.We must not forget, ultimately, that properly accounting for the placement of African artwork is a mutually beneficial gesture in addition to an ethical obligation, one that will result in stronger relationships between African and North American museums. African institutions will hopefully only gain in prominence, agency, and influence in the future, bringing Amadou Mahtar M'Bow's 2000 appeal to fruition. Construction will soon begin for the Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) on the very site of the former Benin Palace. It is set to house the Benin Bronzes (on loan) after a fifty-year dream of restitution, embodying an Afropolitan repatriation of agency (Maples 2020). We are best served by cultivating a future where the most prominent bastions of African cultural heritage can be safely and conscientiously cherished from both sides of the Atlantic.

The Amazonian statue. A biography of a famous and polemic artifact from Brazil

Abstract A large stone statue was brought from the Amazon to France in 1848 by the explorer Francis de Castelnau. It depicts a being, apparently human, squatting, with his hands on his chest. Now exhibited at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, this piece created a strong controversy since it was made public. In the mid-19th century, several Brazilian intellectuals strongly criticized the arrogant attitude of the Frenchman who had ‘looted’ their heritage. In reality, the reasons for this conflict are much deeper since they affect the very identity of the nation, then in formation. In any case, even a play was written to mock the explorer. This gave rise to doubts about the authenticity of the object, which has persisted to this day. The authors therefore studied the artifact to determine its cultural origin, while analyzing existing references to compare it with other pieces from the Amazon. They were thus able to validate the statue’s Amerindian identity, nearly 170 years after its discovery.

"Blindness Gain" as Worldmaking: Audio Description as a New "partage du sensible"

"Blindness Gain" as Worldmaking:Audio Description as a New "partage du sensible" Marion Chottin and Hannah Thompson IN THIS ARTICLE we use our experiences of co-creating creative audio descriptions at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris to suggest that the worldmaking practices of challenge, collaboration, action, and dialogue offer a means to call into question the traditional ways of accessing museum and gallery content that still prevail in (French) society.1 We define "disability's worldmaking" in the museum or art gallery as a two-part process. First, we challenge the 'givenness' of the hierarchies, relationships, and assumptions that govern visitor experience in the museum. Second, we offer an alternative model of visitor engagement where active and dialogic co-creation provides an inclusive alternative to ocularcentric museum experiences. Together, these acts of worldmaking promise an alternative mode of being in the museum that suggests a new politics of access. By going beyond current understandings of 'inclusion,' our project does not limit itself to giving disabled people a museum experience analogous to that of non-disabled people. Instead, it explores and celebrates alternative modes of engaging with art that do more than merely echo normative museum experiences and which, more broadly, open up a new way of making society. Our definition of worldmaking is a counterpoint to Jacques Rancière's concept of "le partage du sensible" and is informed by the concept of "blindness gain." In Rancière's words, le partage du sensible as a political concept is "ce système d'évidences sensibles qui donne à voir en même temps l'existence d'un commun et les découpages qui y définissent les places et les parts respectives."2 Elsewhere, he elaborates on this definition, describing it as "la façon dont les formes d'inclusion et d'exclusion qui définissent la participation à une vie commune sont d'abord configurées au sein même de l'expérience sensible de la vie."3 In other words, according to Rancière, there is "une esthétique de la politique": the assignment of a place to each person in society is manifested through the sensory experience itself, and, for him, particularly in a division between visibility and invisibility; audibility and inaudibility: those who participate in public life are visible and audible, while those who do not are invisible and inaudible (kept hidden and silent within the private sphere). Given that, for Rancière, the realm of art is a privileged place of sensory experience, it is therefore also a privileged place for le partage du sensible, which expresses who has a place in society and who does not. We argue that, nowadays, it is in the museum [End Page 32] or art gallery that the dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion are most starkly played out. But Rancière does not include disabled people among the categories of people—like workers—who, according to him, are excluded from society by the very fact of their invisibility and inaudibility. Neither does he discuss how painting, an art considered supremely visual, produces invisibility, that is, the absence of blind or partially blind people from museums, nor does he consider how the other senses might play a role in reducing blind people's exclusion from art and society. The reasons for these various silences are obvious: by ignoring the domain of disability, Rancière does not perceive its invisibility, and hence the exclusion of disabled people; he thinks of le partage du sensible mainly in terms of visibility and invisibility, without thinking of moving beyond the presumed primacy of sight.4 In our work, we ask how people who are blind or partially blind gain access to the politically and culturally charged space of the museum or art gallery, so that they too can participate in acts of multi-sensory worldmaking and thus undermine le partage du sensible between those who are invisible and inaudible because they are blind, and those who are visible and audible because they are sighted. The theory of "blindness gain" is a reimagining of the notion of "deaf gain" theorized by Bauman and Murray.5 "Deaf gain" is a critical position and...

Entre um mundo e o dos Outros

O artigo apresenta possibilidades para a descolonização dos processos de musealização utilizando a teoria sobre a magia de Marcel Mauss como instrumento para pensar ritualmente o trabalho técnico de preservação e transmissão de bens culturais. Aplica os conceitos teóricos propostos por Mauss à performance museal em duas instituições distintas: o Musée du quai Branly, em Paris, e o Ilê Obá Ogunté – Sítio de Pai Adão, em Recife, Pernambuco. A partir da observação etnográfica de rituais religiosos e não religiosos nas duas realidades culturais estudadas, traça algumas considerações gerais sobre os processos de profanação nos museus e nos terreiros que caracterizam o rito ocidental da musealização.

Every museum has a God, or God is in every museum?

The provocative hypothesis according to which museums are religious public spaces aims to threaten the unwavering secular status of these institutions in the West. In order to interrogate museum agency as secular, we must first ask a question: what is the religion behind every museum? The article proposes the decolonisation of the museum performance, understood as a magical act that in certain conditions produces religious effects. For this purpose, two French exhibitions presented by the Musée du quai Branly were analysed: the museum inaugural exhibition at the Pavillon des Session (2000), at the Louvre, and the short-term exhibition “Mãori. Leurs trésors ont une âme”, presented in the museum’s current building from 4 October 2011 to 22 January 2012, both displaying collections of non-European religious objects.

COLONIAL, POPULAR, AND SCIENTIFIC? The Exposition du Sahara (1934) and the Formation of the Musée de l'Homme

AbstractThis article explores the collection and exhibition practices surrounding the Exposition du Sahara (1934), an exhibit organized at a key moment in the transformation of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro into France's modernized anthropological museum, the Musée de l'Homme. Through an analysis of archival material and exhibit publications, the article traces how the institutionalization of ethnographic collecting practices was shaped by interactions between museum personnel and collectors on the ground, and by the organizers’ desire to make the Exposition du Sahara, and the Musée d'Ethnographie itself, simultaneously scientific, popular, and a successful colonial institution. The account also tells the story of some of the objects from North Africa now housed at the Musée du Quai Branly, where very different modes of interpretation have been applied.

About the Artist: Natalie Robertson

About the Artist: Natalie Robertson Moana Nepia Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhònn chaidh) is an Aotearoa/New Zealand pho tographer, video artist, and senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology whose work has been exhibited at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), Museo Nacional de las Culturas (Mexico City), Musée de la Civilisation (Québec), and Cuba Casa de la Cultura de Tulum (Havana), as well as in Germany, China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, the United States, New Caledonia, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Whether documenting the effects of modern agricultural practices on the natural environment, observing intimate rituals of care and communal responsibility, or tracing tribal pathways along rivers from aerial drone cameras, Robertson draws on both customary and contemporary ways of seeing and histories of storytelling that connect people to places and to one another. Robertson’s work may also be understood in terms of what she describes as a “gap between what is real and what is imagined,” as “the distance between what is now, and what will be” in “the wing-beat of a piwakawaka, a fantail.” Moments captured photographically in this way reveal as much about creative potential and imagination as they do about social concern. Robertson’s photographic contributions for A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving, 1830–1930, written by Ngarino Ellis (2016), won the Judith Binney Best First Book Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In early 2019, she represented Aotearoa/New Zealand at the second Honolulu Biennial (https://www.honolulubiennial.org/honolulubiennial2019). Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Moana Nepia The art featured in this issue can be viewed in full color in the online versions. [End Page v] Click for larger view View full resolution Boiled Pig Head, Te Rimu, Tikapa, by Natalie Robertson, 2012. Inkjet print on Ilford Gold Silk Paper, 22 x 28 inches. In October 1769, Captain James Cook and his Endeavour crew reached Aotearoa/New Zealand. Within the first hour of land-fall at Turanga-nui-a-Kiwa (now the site of Gisborne city) crew members killed Te Maro, a local Ngāti Oneone rangatira (chief). By the end of the next day, several more Māori were shot dead. Two hundred and fifty years later, these events still loom large in the minds of local Māori. As in Hawai‘i, where he was eventually killed, Cook is remembered by many for the tragic consequences of such interactions and the devastating impacts of colonization that followed rather than for his application of scientific methods to exploration. Robertson’s Boiled Pig Head takes on heightened meaning in this light. Feral pigs nicknamed “Captain Cookers,” first introduced by early European visitors, are now hunted by Māori; boiled with kūmara (sweet potato), puha (sow thistle), and watercress; or cooked in hāngi (earth ovens), especially on large festive occasions. [End Page vi] Click for larger view View full resolution Nukutaimemeha, Rangitukia, by Natalie Robertson, 2011. Inkjet print on Ilford Gold Silk Paper, 22 x 28 inches. For the people of Ngāti Porou, from Aotearoa/New Zealand’s East Coast region, Nukutaimemeha is the name of the waka from which Maui fished up Te Ika-a-Maui (North Island). They believe it remains in fossilized form on Mt Hikurangi, the tallest mountain in this region and the first point of land in Aotearoa/New Zealand to see the sun each day. The waka in this image, bearing the full name Te Aio o Nukutaimemeha, was carved by Greg Matahi Whakataka-Brightwell, who is renowned for helping to rejuvenate the art of oceangoing waka building in Aotearoa/New Zealand and introducing waka ama (outrigger canoe) racing to the country’s sporting scene. Commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Nukutaimemeha measures approximately 45 meters long and was completed in 1999. Never launched, Nukutaimemeha has rested in a paddock at the mouth of the Waiapu River for many years. Plans to move it to Mt Hikurangi were announced in 2019. [End Page vii] Click for larger view...

Evaluating “Cultural Translation” and Intermodal Address in the Musée du quai Branly's Exhibition of African Material Objects

The debate on what cultural translation as an analytical and political tool can offer has sparked much discussion in translation studies as well as in the fields of anthropology, literature, and cultural studies. To a lesser degree, some museum studies scholars have likewise evoked the notion of translation to address the ethics of representing culture in and across differences. This article expands on these discussions by evaluating whether a translational lens can serve to rethink the display of African material culture in museums. Through an analysis of the textual, spatial, and visual elements of the permanent African exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (MQB) in Paris, France, I argue that though the MQB claims that it seeks to foster cultural dialogue, the “translations” of its African collection tend to reproduce the museum’s norms of meaning-making, rather than the norms of the non-European cultures it presents. However, I also suggest that by approaching its task as one of multimodal translation, the MQB could reshape its museographic language to reflect ways of making meaning that are more evenly in dialogue with ways of making meaning from the objects’ contexts of origin.

New Insights into Use-Wear Development in Bodily Ornaments Through the Study of Ethnographic Collections

The use of microwear analysis has made substantial contributions to the study of archaeological bodily ornaments. However, limitations persist with regard to the interpretation of use and the reconstruction of systems of attachment, hampering a holistic understanding of the diversity of past bodily adornment. This is because the complexities of ornament biographies and the resulting wear traces cannot be grasped exclusively from the study of experimental reference collections. In this paper, we propose to bridge this gap in interpretation by systematically researching ethnographic collections. We conducted a microscopic study of 38 composite ornaments from lowland South America housed at the Musée du quai Branly (Paris). These objects involve organic, biomineral, and inorganic components, attached through different string configurations. The combined use of optical and 3D digital microscopy at different magnification ranges provided a thorough understanding of wear trace formation, distribution, and characterization. We demonstrate how individual beads develop characteristic use-wear in relation to one another and to the strings. We further challenge common assumptions made in the analysis of archaeological ornaments. In sum, this research addresses methodological and interpretative issues in the study of bodily adornment at large, by providing insight into the biographies of objects that were actually worn in a lived context. In the future, our results can be applied as reference for a more effective understanding of the use of ornaments worldwide.

What else to say about the MQB? Re-centring anthropology in art and French museum practices: A vision from an <em>ex-boursier</em>

This short piece investigates how “art” and “ethnography” have developed as two separated practices in ten years of existence of the Musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac (MQB) and how “politics” has been widely missing. Writing from a personal experience as a postdoctoral ex-boursier and building on recent essays about the genesis of the museum, the author seeks to identify points of raptures existent not only in the MQB as a cultural institution but also within the system of French ethnology, which does not leave sufficient space for art to dialogue with ethnography, nor for politics to dialogue with aesthetics. Rather than depicting the MQB as a “post-ethnographic museum” (de l’Estoile 2015), the author identifies in the Musée a good terrain for creating an “ethno-art-graphic” museum, where creative ethnographic collections will eventually make both art and anthropology.

‘Tous ceux sans qui la France ne serait pas la France’: The case for a French national museum of colonial histories

Although France is known as the country of museums, it has yet to inaugurate a museum of French history. At a time of mounting tensions between an increasingly multiracial and multicultural French population, on the one hand, and an inherently problematic model of French Republican integration on the other, one wonders whose history would be represented. In the wake of one of France’s worst cases of social unrest – the 2005 riots – Paris opened two new national museums (the Musée du Quai Branly and the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration), which held great promise of leading France toward postcoloniality. Unfortunately, neither site advanced the nation’s largely silenced conversation about its colonial history, its enduring effects and its contemporary manifestations. Against a backdrop of increased Islamophobia, exacerbated as much by the 2015–17 terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice as by the anti-’immigration’ rhetoric during the 2017 presidential elections, I examine the call for a new museum and its potential to bring France closer to postcoloniality.

The Color Line: African American Artists and Segregation – Musée du Quai Branly

When I was a student in the Latin Quarter, I often walked by the commemorative plaque in honor of African-American writer, Richard Wright, located Rue Monsieur Le Prince. Thanks to Wright and his works, I came across the experience of Black American artists in Paris after World War One, which they commonly described as a liberation and a rebirth compared to the sufferings of being second rank citizens in their mother country. Unfortunately, the French general public hardly recollects the pres...