- The Time Museum reopened this Tuesday May 19 in Besançon, after more than two months of closure linked to the coronavirus.
- He is presenting the exhibition Time is Tomi , a tribute to the Alsatian designer Tomi Ungerer.
- Inside, everything has been redesigned to meet new health safety standards.
There is no crowd at the moment, and this is normal, the authorization of the prefecture fell the day before: the Time Museum in Besançon reopened its doors on Tuesday May 19, after more than two months of closure, online virtual tours, web series and confined workshops. An hour and a half after the start, the institution, one of the first in the region to deconfine, had welcomed ten visitors, according to Philippe, the reception agent who counts the ghosts. Because there is no question of exceeding the maximum authorized gauge, of 50 people at the same time, instead of the 700 that the museum can usually receive in its generous bosom.
Inside, everything has been redesigned to meet the new safety standards. The team of "heritage assistants", as the director likes to call them, has grown from seven to ten agents, to better guide visitors. Next to the drawings by Tomi Ungerer, hung as part of the exhibition Time is Tomi , which explores the artist's relationship to time, signs indicate the obligatory direction of visit, and posts with a cord invite you not to not invent a new path. Added to this are arrows on the ground and prohibited directions, and of course hydroalcoholic gel at the entrance and at the shop, at the end of the journey.
"I am convinced that we had to reopen"
Exit on the other hand the explanatory sheets and the rare objects which can usually be manipulated, like a pendulum allowing to understand the gravitation. There will be no audio guide on smartphones, but there are still signs on the walls. Enough to read the title of this hilarious and powerful drawing by the Alsatian satirist, representing a woman who kicks the buttocks of a skeleton, making her spit her dentures: "Triumph of life". One of Laurence Reibel's favorites, the curator, who is delighted to reopen this exhibition which she co-created, and which attracted nearly 5,000 visitors in February.
This reopening is also a real joy for the director of the museums in the center of Besançon (Time Museum and Museum of Fine Arts) Nicolas Surlapierre, who says he is “excited” and “happy”: “We wanted to open so much that 'We were ready for a lot of sacrifices,' he says. “I am convinced that we had to reopen. When we distinguished between essential and non-essential services, and I understood that culture was not going to be part of essential services, I accused the blow, ”he adds.
Reinvented museography
The director still apologizes for having to remove touch and interaction. As a good specialist of the contemporary period, he was imbued with relational aesthetics, theorized in particular by the critic and art historian Nicolas Bourriaud. But he tidies up there, and tries to find positive sides to the period.
According to him, the coronavirus opens up a new field for museography, inviting us to think differently: “This forced us to put ourselves in the shoes of the visitor, to break down the route. I don't think we will go back to the scenography before. Our goal is to make the constraint interesting, ”he comments, with Oulipian accents. He also notes that this period of confinement brought him "humanly" closer to his team.
Comfort, heal
But Nicolas Surlapierre remains worried for the future: “There will be a lot of breakage. There is a physical, emotional, social distance that is being established ... We have never been so close to thinking that the other was an enemy. The haunting of the other is perceptible: there are people who jump on the street because they are afraid. And at the same time there are very beautiful things: I hope that we will have the imagination to try to console, to heal. "
As a wink, the drawing which opens the exhibition Time is Tomi is a self-portrait of the artist, who quietly reads a book, with death seated at his side, in the form of a skeleton. The expression of a “peaceful relationship” with its own end, comments Laurence Reibel, the curator of the Musée du Temps. As an invitation to take this epidemic wisely.
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- Franche-Comté
- Deconfinement
- Covid 19
- Coronavirus
- Culture
- Besancon
- Museum