"To die: what a story!", a delicate exhibition to break taboos

Three hundred objects from the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, the Mucem in Marseille and the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes to tell our relationship to death in the world, such is the challenge proposed in this Breton exhibition until December, a stone's throw from Brest, Quimper or Morlaix.

Apouéma mourning mask of the early twentieth century, Kanak population (New Caledonia). © Musée des Confluences, Lyon.

Text by: Olivier Favier Follow

Advertising

Read more

The Abbey of Notre-Dame de Daoulas, in Brittany (west of the France), is one of the five departmental domains gathered in a single public institution of cultural cooperation (EPCC), "Les chemins du patrimoine en Finistère". If the public knows the beauty of its gardens, currently magnified by the photographs of Sophie Zénon, which explore a working-class family memory of northern Italy, it nevertheless celebrates the major annual exhibitions. The latter have taken us, in the past, from the Amazon to the Far North, but also enjoy unusual questions – skin, hair –, spiritual – voodoo, religions of ecstasy –, or universal – love, the taste of others, the zeitgeist.

Funeral ritual of Kuarup in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. © Serge Guiraud / Jabiru-Prod

The last proposal, prepared by the curator, Édith Joseph, and the curator of the Museum of Brittany in Rennes, Laurence Prod'homme, brings together these three main axes by choosing to approach in a comparative perspective, from the sixteenth century to the present day and on all continents, a theme that is both universal and unusual for an event intended for a wide audience. If the subject is demanding, the process is perfectly accessible, calling visitors to continue their exploration rather than giving in to quick conclusions.

Die. What's next?

"Give meaning" is the watchword that guided the three stages of the journey, which also correspond to those of mourning: restraint, separation and reshuffle. Many of the preserved objects testify to rituals reserved for the very wealthy classes, such as these cardiotaphes – reliquaries containing the heart of the deceased – the most famous, that of Anne of Brittany, is in Nantes, at the Dobrée Museum. "Sometimes," explains Edith Joseph, "the husband's heart could be buried with the wife's body and vice versa.

Always in connection with Breton culture, there are outfits of great mourning – which had to be worn one year – and half-mourning – six months –, a usage that appeared in the West in the seventeenth century, which lasted until the years 1970-1980, exclusively reserved for women. Men, on the other hand, could be satisfied with a simple armband. In other cultural contexts, "mourners" are mandated to wear a specific outfit and accompany relatives, sometimes for several years.

Undated portrait of two grieving women. © Museum of Brittany, Rennes.

An important place is given to post-mortem photographs, including portraits of children, which recall how, until recently, infant and child mortality was high and how reaching adulthood was already a challenge. This practice still existed in the 1990s in the Vendée, for example, and is still perpetuated today in Eastern Europe. If taking a selfie with a deceased person seems sacrilegious to us, what about our relationship with the deceased when it seems taboo or morbid to us to want to "immortalize" him? Without judgment on the evolution of practices, it is such questions that these images also seem to ask us.

Towards another world? Us and the dead?

It is again with a question that the second and third parts of the exhibition open. Memento mori ("Remember that you are going to die"), figurations of the Ankou – personification of death in Breton culture –, of the "great grim reaper", idyllic or nightmarish representations of the afterlife that inform us especially about the conceptions of the world at work among the living and the political stakes of religion, everything seems to tell us that the boundaries between life and death remain much more labile than we imagine.

Souvenir en hair, Blanche Millon, Paris. © Mucem

What do we do beyond mourning the memory of our ancestors, whether physical or moral? "Memorabilia in hair" – "relic-paintings" of the nineteenth century – objects deposited at the site of Lady Diana's accident, a model of the war memorial at Pen-Hir Point in Camaret, reveals the diversity of practices in France alone.

Conversely, reliquaries are found both in France and Gabon, for example, and the figure of the revenant – whose death was violent or not properly honored – is a universal that runs through tales and legends. "To die... sleep, sleep! Dreaming perhaps. [...] This is the obstacle, for in this sleep of death, what dreams will come..." ("The monologue of Hamlet" by Shakespeare).

"To die, what a story!", an exhibition presented at the Abbey of Daoulas, from June 9 to December 3, 2023. Note that the exhibition will be deployed in a slightly modified form at the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes, from March 16 to September 22, 2024.

Also to be seen, as part of the Heritage Paths in Finistère, at the manor of Kernault, the exhibition "Fantastic creatures" and the exhibition "Lands of fortune and misfortune (the first sixteenth-eighteenth century interbreeding)" at the castle of Kerjean, both until November 5, 2023.

Our selection on the subject:

Listen:

• Mourning: questions to a shrink
• What reform in France with regard to the end of life?
• Perinatal bereavement in France: a suffering little recognized and still taboo (on France 24)

Further reading:

• A brief history of euthanasia and assisted suicide since ancient times
• Philippe Ariès, Histoire de la mort en Occident : du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Points Histoire, Le Seuil, 2014.
• Melanie Klein, Deuil et depression, Paris, Payot, coll. « Petite Bibliothèque Payot », 2004.

Newsletter Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

Read on on the same topics:

• Society
• Culture
• Exhibition