35 Carità 1953, p. 363. Translation by the author: “Ho osservato che, per l’illuminazione di opere singole, all’aperto o in vetrina, la sorgente di luce è collocata, quasi sempre, troppo vicina e con diretta incidenza sull’oggetto, dimenticando che, fra le tante possibilità di danno che incombono sui dipinti, non ultima è la decolorazione.”

36 Carità 1953, p. 359. Translation by the author: “L’opportunità di tali superfici non è dettata da motivi di gusto, ne ‘sentimento’ il senso di riposo che nasce dalla visione di esse. Se ne possono spiegare le cause ricorrendo ad analogie acustiche, poiché le radiazioni luminose e quelle sonore seguono spesso leggi simili. Come le stoffe, spegnendo gli echi, danno una sensazione ‘felpata’, così le superfici opache agiscono nei riguardi della luce. E, ancora, come generano fastidio le risonanze e gli echi a chi ascolti una musica, così recano disturbo i riflessi dispersi ed inutili che giungono all’occhio di chi osserva un’opera d’arte: con la differenza che un disturbo sonoro è immediatamente avvertito, mentre un disturbo ottico, compreso nel campo visivo ma non nel fuoco della pupilla, è un disturbo sentito ma non immediatamente spiegato. Risultato è la stanchezza.”

37 This peculiar point was highlighted by Catherine André, deputy to the head of the education and culture department for mediation projects of the Petit Palais, during the Séance 7 of the Diplôme d'université Delphine Lévy. Pour l'accès à l'art et au patrimoine : outils et recherches, “Accessibilité universelle et musée inclusive”, that was hosted by the Petit Palais in Paris on the 1st of December 2023.

38 Musso 2022, p. 58.

39 Marini 2022, p. 88.

40 Today's museums, and especially their temporary expositions, are in concurrence with other industries for culture and entertainment; they need to be more exciting and dramatic, which is often possible with light.

41 On this occasion, Bradburn Cited the text “In Praise of Shadows” by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki to underline how without shadows we forget the importance of light, and that good lighting cannot be made visible without good shadows.

42 The association is still active today: www.iald.org.

43 A divergence in experiences, often made more apparent by different national educational systems, is leading to the quick formation of various local traditions and habits that come from the sensibilities learned from a multitude of career paths. A diversity in perspective that as strongly expanded the horizons of the relationship between light and ‘care’. This difference in study paths between nations is also probably one of the many reasons for today’s broad cultural landscape on the topic of light and for the drastically different usage and habits worldwide.

44 See also: Illuminating Engineering Society of North America 1996.

45 Andrea Graser observes on this topic how: “Light has the potential to be sensed as a space. A streetlight, for example, is perceived as a cone of light in the darkness”; Graser 2023, p.29.

46 Mestrangelo 2017, p. 81.

47 Graser 2023, p.11.

48 See also CIE 2004.

49 Graser 2023, p. 45.

50 Many researchers demonstrated that the Human Centric Light system can positively impact the well-being of employees and reduce the number of sick days inside offices or improve the buying habits of customers inside retail structures. See for example: Kyle Konis, 2019.

51 See for example: Veitch 2001.

52 Laganier, Van Der Pol 2011.
53 Laganier 2010. Translation by the author: “Chiedendosi chi siano gli utenti, che cosa fanno e come utilizzeranno gli edifici, i progettisti dell'illuminazione possono contribuire alla loro felicità e alla loro salute”.

54 Gobbato 2024, pp. 71-73.

55 Gobbato 2024, pp. 135-136. Translation by the author, original text: “Par un geste effaçable, l’éclairage participe d’une forme de restauration ésthétique des œuvres. Ce geste admet une dimension de transformation perceptible et formelle de l’œuvre au musée. L’objet auparavant connu sous une facette dévoile sous la lumière un tout autre visage. Une telle dimension assimile l’éclairage à un outil capable d’orienter et de modifier la perception, mais aussi à la patrimonialisation de l’objet institutionalisé”.

56 Informations regarding the design awarded with the Compasso d'Oro can be found on the site of the ADI Design Museum - Compasso d'Oro: https://www.adidesignmuseum.org/schede/shuttle/; https://www.adidesignmuseum.org/schede/mondial-f1/.

57 The Multireflex light system, developed by Anniluce, can illuminate a space by exploiting just two high-yield, low-consumption light sources that are reflected downward by 31 mirrors divided in two rows. See: https://www.annilucebylightstudio.it/multireflex-detail.

## References

Bianchi, Pulcini 1995: Bianchi F., Pulcini G., *Manuale di illuminotecnica*, Roma, NIS, 1995.

Bucci 2016: Bucci F., *Spazi atmosferici*, in Bucci F., Rossari A. (eds.) *I musei e gli allestimenti di Franco Albini*, Milano, Electa, 2016, pp. 16-41.

Burns 1933: Burns N., *L'éclairages d'oeuvres exposées par groups dans les musées*, in "Mouseion", 1933, 20, 4, p.126.

Carità 1953: Carità R., *Nota sull'illuminazione artificiale delle opere d'arte*, in "Bollettino d'Arte", 1953, IV, III, ottobre-dicembre, pp. 357-364.

Cellerier 1931: Cellerier J.F., *Le chauffage, la ventilation et l'éclairage dans les salles d'exposition*, in "Mouseion", 1931, 16, 6, pp.66-76.

CIE 2004: CIE, *Control of Damage to Museum Objects by Optical Radiation. Technical Report*, Vienna, 2004.

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche 1962: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, *Manuale dell'architetto*, Terza Edizione, Roma, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1962.

Curzi 2022: Curzi V., *Questioni storico-critiche e pratica professionale: per una introduzione allammuseologia e alla museografia del dopoguerra*, in Curzi V. (ed.), *Musei Italiani del dopoguerra (1945-1977). Ricognizioni storiche e prospettive future*, Milano, Skira, 2022, pp. 7-30.

De Felice, Piva 1979: De Felice E. B., Piva A., *Le tecniche museali*, in "Casabella", 1979, 443, p. 45.

De Simone, Modesti 2022: De Simone A., Modesti C., *Il museo nel secondo dopoguerra: sguardi dal "Bollettino d'arte"*, in Curzi V. (ed.), *Musei Italiani del dopoguerra (1945-1977). Ricognizioni storiche e prospettive future*, Milano, Skira, 2022, pp. 189-228.

Druzik, Eshøj 2007: Druzik J., Eshøj B., *Museum lighting: its past and future development*, in Padfield T., Borchersen K. (eds.), *Museum microclimates: Contributions to the conference in Copenhagen 19-23 November 2007*, Copenhagen, Nationalmuseet i København, 2007, pp. 51-56.

Durand 1802: Durand J.N.L., *Précis des leçons d'architecture données à l'École Polytechnique*, par J.-N.-L. Durand, vol.1, Paris, Firmin Didot-Imprimeur du Roi, 1802.
Forcolini 2012: Forcolini G., *La luce del museo*, Santarcangelo di Romagna, Maggioli Editore, 2012.

Gobbato 2024: Gobbato V., *Au-delà du regard, Éclairer le musée, du design à la médiation*, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2024.

Gobbato 2021: Gobbato V., *On how Lighting Shaped Museums*, in “Nuova Museologia”, 2021, 45, pp. 24-36.

Graser 2023: Graser A., *Light Up, The potential of light in museum architecture*, Basel, Birkhäuser, 2023.

Guadet 1901: Guadet J., *Éléments et théorie de l'architecture: cours professé à l'école nationale et spéciale des beaux arts*, Paris, Librairie de la construction modern, 1901.

Illuminating Engeneering Society of North America 1996: Illuminating Engeneering Society of North America, *Museum and Art Gallery Lightning: a Recommended Practice*, IESNA, 1996.

Konis 2019: Konis K., *A circadian design assist tool to evaluate daylight access in buildings for human biological lighting needs*, in “Solar Energy”, 2019, 191, pp. 449-458.

Laganier 2010: Laganier V., *Luce, Salute e Benessere*, in “Luminous Rivista Internazionale di Illuminazione”, 2010, 5, p. 22.

Laganier, Van Der Pol 2011: Laganier V., Van Der Pol J., *Light and Emotions: Exploring Lighting Cultures, Conversations With Lighting Designers*, Basel, Birkhauser Architecture, 2011.

Marini 2022: Marini P., *Il Museo di Castelvecchio tra conservazione e innovazione*, in Curzi V. (ed.), *Musei Italiani del dopoguerra (1945-1977). Ricognizioni storiche e prospettive future*, Milano, Skira, 2022, pp. 45-66.

Mestrangelo 2017: Mestrangelo G., *Diva Luce, Monghidoro, Con-fine edizioni d'Arte & Cultura*, 2017.

Morello 1997: Morello P., *La museografia. Opere e modelli storiografici*, in Dal Cò F. (ed.) *Storia dell'architettura italiana. Il secondo Novecento*, Milano, Electa, 1997, p. 392.

Musso 2022: Musso S.F., *Il restauro del Tesoro di San Lorenzo a Genova: tutela di manufatti, visitatori e opera di Franco Albini*, in Curzi V. (ed.), *Musei Italiani del dopoguerra (1945-1977). Ricognizioni storiche e prospettive future*, Milano, Skira, 2022, pp. 45-66.

Sanpaolesi 1949: Sanpaolesi P., *Tipi di lucernari per l'illuminazione dei musei*, in “Bolletino d’arte”, 1949, XXXIV, IV, luglio-settembre, pp. 280-283.

Sestrieri 1953: Sestrieri P.C., *Il nuovo Museo di Paestum*, in “Bollettino dell’arte”, 1953, IV, II, aprile-giugno, pp.176-182.

Società des Nations, Office International des Musées, Istitut Internazional de Coopération Intellectuelle 1934: Société des Nations, Office International des Musées, Istitut Internazional de Coopération Intellectuelle, *Museographie : architecture et aménagement des musées d’art : Conference internationale d’études, Madrid, 1934*, Madrid, Institut international de cooperation intellectuelle, 1934.

Spinosa 2007: Spinosa A., *La ricerca applicata al restauro: L’esperienza di Piero Sanpaolesi*, PhD thesis in Conservazione dei Beni Architettonici, Napoli, Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”, 2007.

Veitch 2001: Veitch J., *Psychological Processes Influencing Light Quality*, in “Journal of Illuminating Engeneering Society”, 2001, 30, 1, pp.124-140.

Vienot, Durand, Mahler 2009: Vienot F., Durand M. L., Mahler E., *Kruithof's rule revisited using LED illumination*, in “Journal of Modern Optics”, 2009, 56, 13, pp. 1433-1446.

Vivioli, Galati 2014: Vivioli M., Galati M.G., *La luce nello spazio del museo: significati e prospettive per una valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale*, in Rossi M., Marchiafava V. (eds.), *Colore e Colorimetria Contributi Multidisciplinari, Vol. X A, Santarcangelo di Romagna, Maggioli Editore, 2014*.
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Federico Maria Giorgi
Exhibition design and lighting: notes on the genesis of the debate between conservation, public emotion, and care

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.3034-9699/21599
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# Interview with Clémentine Deliss

Clémentine Deliss

Keywords:

Art school, museology, ethnology, museography, learning, contemporary art, architecture, design.

## ABSTRACT:

The author presents a series of case studies detailing her initiatives within educational institutions, namely art schools and museums of ethnology and contemporary art. The objective of these initiatives is to affect a renewal of contemporary museology. The author then provides a concise overview of the options defined for a museum that encourages critical interventions by both guest researchers and artists, and by visitors. These options include furnishings, tables and chairs that have been specially designed by architects.

L'autrice illustra le sue diverse esperienze nelle scuole d'arte e nei musei di etnologia e arte contemporanea per rinnovare la museologia contemporanea. Riassume le opzioni definite per un museo che favorisca interventi critici, sia da parte dei ricercatori e degli artisti invitati, sia da parte dei visitatori, attraverso arredi specifici, come tavoli e sedie appositamente progettati da architetti.

L'auteure rend compte de ses différentes interventions dans des écoles d'art et dans des musées d'ethnologie et d'art contemporain pour renouveler la muséologie contemporaine. Elle résume les options définies à propos d'un musée favorisant les interventions critiques à la fois chez les chercheurs et artistes invités et chez les visiteurs, grâce à des mobiliers spécifiques, tables et chaises spécialement dessinées par des architectes.

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Clémentine Deliss is a curator, publisher and cultural historian. She studied contemporary art and semantic anthropology in Vienna, Paris, and London and holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London. Between 2010-2015, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, instituting a new research laboratory to remediate collections within a post-ethnological context. Exhibitions she curated at the Weltkulturen Museum include Object Atlas - Fieldwork in the Museum (2011), Trading Style (2013), Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn't tell a stranger) (2014), and El Hadji Sy - Painting, Politics, Performance (2015). From 2002-2009, she ran the transdisciplinary collective Future Academy with student research cells in London, Edinburgh, Dakar, Mumbai, Bangalore, Melbourne, and Tokyo. Since 1996, she has published the itinerant and independent artists' and writers' organ, "Metronome" that was twice part of documenta in Kassel (1997, dX and 2007, d12). She has held guest professorships at the Städelschule Frankfurt, the University of the Arts in Kassel, and was Reader at the Edinburgh College of Art between 2003-2009. She has acted as an expert consultant for the European Union and was on the Scientific Council of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris between 2011-2019. In 2017-18, she curated four international roundtables on "Transitioning Museums" in South East Asia for the Goethe-Institut. The Dilijan Arts Observatory, which she curated in 2016, was a gathering of artists, historians, and scientists in a former electronics factory in Armenia. The results were exhibited in Portable Homelands. From Field to Factory as

part of Hello World. Revising a Collection (National Galerie im Hamburg Bahnhof, Berlin, April-August 2018). In 2017-2018 she was Visiting Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy. During this time, she held an International Chair at the Laboratoire d'Excellence des Arts et Médiations Humaines, Université, Paris 8 and Centre Georges Pompidou. Between 2020-2023, she was Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin where she ran her Metabolic Museum-University (mmu.online) and curated the exhibition Skin in the Game. She is currently Curator at Large at KANAL-Centre Pompidou, and Guest Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Brussels. She is Honorary Professor of Global Humanities in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She lives in Berlin.

In your book, *The Metabolic Museum*, first elaborated at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, you wrote that “the new model for the museum would be the house itself, a renewal of a domestic environment of repose and reflection, of living, dialoguing, researching, and production in contrast to a corporate site of consumerist culture”.¹ So you intimately link the ethos of care with domestic design. How can we think about the intimacy of care within public space, and in the framework of the welfare state over the last decades of liberal democracies, where anonymous functionalism seems to characterize all effective care structures?
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When I deploy the term “domes-
tic”, I am pointing to the effects that
space has on behavior and on the
performance of research. I pay at-
tention to the architectonic agency
of museums because I regard the
institution like a body, built from a
constellation of interdependent or-
gans that come together to produce
a venue, a metabolism.

This notion of “metabolism” is
absolutely fascinating, but it has
been worked on in a different way
before, in literature in particular.
Without multiplying parallel or
opposite evocations, the compari-
son between the museum and the
brothel became a classic in the lit-
erature of the interwar period and
beyond, best represented by the
ethnologist writer Michel Leiris.
A chapter of *L’âge d’homme*² is en-
titled “Lupanars and Museums”,
in which the author writes that
“nothing seems to me to resemble
a brothel as much as a museum.
There’s the same shady side and

the same petrified side”. Indeed,
Michel Leiris goes on to develop
his observations, and writes that
in museums “certain lost corners
must be the scene of hidden lu-
bricity”. In contrast, the photo-
graphs of the Museum-University
you are working on and designing
suggest a sanitized white cube,
nothing “louche” at all. How do
you see this?

I am glad you mention Michel Leiris. I wrote my PhD on his contribution to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in the 1930s while he was alive, and more specifically on the journal “Documents” (1929-31). Since that time, I have been obsessed with the notion of the publishing organ – as a vital vehicle for the expression of artists and writers. In one issue of “Documents”, Georges Bataille illustrated the entry on “Dust” (Poussière) with a photograph of two mannikins leaning against a wall in a storage room of the ethnographic museum. In oth-
er texts, he spoke of the museum as the lungs of the city.³ A further reference for me is Olympia Press, the notorious publishing house of Maurice Girodias that produced both seminal books such as *Lolita* as well as a quantity of pornographic texts. His hybrid jazz cellar and hotel in 1950s Paris was notorious. I too launched my publishing organ, *Metronome* No. 9 and Metronome Press in a hotel near l'Opéra in Paris. In 2005, I hired all the rooms for one night for the sum of 1500 Euro. For 24 hours, the contributing writers, artists and guests filled the rooms with activities that were private. I had forgotten to remove the keys from the locks, with results that you can only imagine.

However today, museums are formatted to provide a maximum of publicly accessible areas that correspond to an increasingly consumerist imperative. Only very rarely do we find a private apartment for artists-in-residency within the parameters of a museum building. Likewise, rooms in which collections

can be brought into contact with one another, placed in assemblages and reflected upon prior to an exhibition are kept to a minimum. The digitalization of holdings and the use of databanks as the foundation for curatorial elaboration works to minimize the backstage of the museum. In Frankfurt at the Weltkulturen Museum, domestic research was facilitated by the simple fact that the buildings were 19th century villas. In other words, they had been constructed with the intention to provide shelter for people to live together. Until I arrived there in 2010, this aspect had been denied. The rooms of the three villas had suffered a form of scenographic camouflage, an attempt to hide from sight the original functions of the houses. During my time there – which ended in 2015 – guest researchers and artists could move freely between their apartment on the top floor, the studio spaces right below, the laboratory on the ground floor with its specially designed furniture by Mathis Esterhazy, and the

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Interview with Clémentine Deliss</figcaption></figure>
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photographic archive in the basement. There was a daily cyclical experience of sleeping, working, reading, and observing the assemblages of artefacts, all on site in the museum. The moment I left, the structure was closed down by the city and I was accused of running a hotel! This may seem an extreme judgement, yet I recognize models for this type of work in the “half-way house”, and even the “maison de passe”. The villa-museum was intended as a site for the activation of desire and remediation that would be collection-centric, recursive, and domestic in scale.

**The need for museums to develop infrastructure to enable “multi-disciplinary inquiry” poses an architectural and design challenge that you feel is essential. How would you characterize it?**

It is a challenge to rework the spatial parameters of museums in terms of design and inquiry. I've never understood why patterns of

use remain so entrenched. In the past there were more chairs and sofas strategically placed for people to relax on while looking at an artwork. Today we are asked to follow a plan of consumption, to walk through exhibitions, stand upright and still for the time it takes to read a panel, and then are made to move on through the café and bookshop. This phenomenon is closely related to the ergonomy of the department store where consumerism requires moving through rather than spending hours at one counter or sitting down. Airports, department stores and museums are growing in similarity. The public is browbeaten to follow the route with its overbearing explanatory devices.

As an antidote to this state of play, I work on the concept of a Museum-University. The image it conjures up in my mind is of a wave of inquiry that gently floods the everyday practice of the museum-goer. No one needs proof of education to enter a museum, unlike its sister civic institutions such as the university or the art college. In the Muse-
um-University, visitors are encour-
aged to stop, sit down, spend time
and study in the society of artworks
and collections. Multidisciplinarity
describes the visitors' heterogene-
ous backgrounds, the diversity of
collections brought into the muse-
um-university, and the forms of in-
terpretation and future meanings
that can emerge out of this exercise.

Efficient furniture, lighting are
actors of all the liturgies, mani-
festations of reverence, attention,
ceremonies – to which the muse-
um is often referred. How do you
imagine an alternative to these
devices?

I often speak about scenography
as a drug for curators and muse-
ums. I mention addiction because
the industry is so compelling and
seductive that the curator of a Kun-
thalle, not to mention a museum,
will prefer to spend a considerable
portion of their budget on building
and painting temporary walls rath-
er than allocating expenditure to
artistic production or artists' fees.
Institutions rely on scenography be-
lieving that artworks are simply not
enough, or that they are, by nature,
inaccessible. Lighting and tempo-
rary wall structures are part of this
process of psychological compen-
sation. The artwork overwhelmed
by textual explanations recedes
into the background or has to fight
against scenography. The artist's in-
tentions and the artwork's semantic
power are diminished to little more
than the illustration of a theme.

Furniture however is something
different. It has a function that may
contradict the draw of consumer-

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Interview with Clémentine Deliss</figcaption></figure>
ism. Tables and chairs are rarely introduced into exhibitions unless as a cosmetic gesture. I'm interested in how we can change the parameters of human experience within museum spaces. For that we need to think about what can be achieved in a museum and how artworks can form the basis for a flourishing of the democratic intellect. Every visitor has the right to form their own opinion and should be encouraged to engage in a form of poaching between disciplines and cultures to quote Michel de Certeau.⁴ The visitor can be a “braconnier” of visual representation rather than a flâneur of exhibitions.

In some cases, the artist wants to hide his work inside a museum, forbidding access or at least reproduction, making it an inacessible object. Christian Boltanski, for example, has buried some of his installations or concealed them in various hiding places in some museums.

This is a specific work that problematizes the archival. However today access to storage areas in museums is kept to a minimum implying that any visit must operate through a go-between in the shape of a curator or keeper who has the authority to guide and control knowledge. I'm concerned with the sequestration of collections, the categories used to classify them, and the value they may have for the education of future generations. I have written a manifesto on this question.⁵ I don't believe that the fashion for open storage design is an option here. Open storage – which you can find in neo-universalist museums such

as the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, or the soon to open V&A East in London's Docklands, actually entrenches taxonomies from earlier times. It allows for superficial observation and gloating but prevents any mobility within collections in favor of a static display.

You created a Laboratory in the museum, a workshop space, studios and apartments. Is that reminiscent of the Alexandria Mouseion? Did the workshops held in Dahlem prior to the opening of the Humboldt Forum relate to your project? Likewise, are there models in curatorial studies programs that work on similar lines as yours?

The model I developed has not been explored in other contexts. Nothing that was organized by the Humboldt Lab ahead of the Forum's opening can be compared to the activities and research models that I enabled in Frankfurt. It also differs from the University Museum in the US that is increasingly made to cater to large audiences rather than internal teaching and research. But take the Schaulager in Basel as a further model. It is an extraordinary project constructed around rooms for individual artist's collections ranging from Christian Boltanski to Andrea Zittel or Matthew Barney. This is definitely a research-based museum. However, when I visited the place, eager to see how research was undertaken, I was told that 90 minutes was the average time spent in the room of a specific artist. There would be a curator watching over you, and no table. The idea was to observe, take notes standing up,
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and then move to the library next door and write. What I did in Frankfurt was much more extreme. There was no curator watching the artists and we trusted them. We gave them 24 hours access over four weeks. No one in the laboratory broke or sabotaged anything from the museum's collection. We trusted our guests and they were respectful of the situation.

**You explain the power of a collection in terms of mobility: multiple reconfigurations and new and varied meanings. What are the main challenges in this respect in terms of caring for the public, their comfort and their expectations?**

I like to believe that imagination is a faculty of care and well-being. The Museum-University is about empowering the imaginary of the individual visitor through visual thinking. Constellations of artefacts from different collections are created in

order to encourage a cross-fertilization of meanings across disciplinary boundaries. This can be liberating for the public. The dogma of explanation so well described by Jacques Rancière in *The Ignorant Schoolmaster* is suspended.⁶ Instead, there is a sense of emancipation in the minds of visitors, of heightened curiosity. It's another form of fieldwork in the museum in which chance and desire are kindled.

**Beyond practical necessities and the need for depots and storage, the issue of museum logistics is becoming a political one. It ac companies a turning point in art history with regard to the trans portation of works of art and of course with respect to museums of migration, museums of ethnology and so on. What does this situation inspire in you?**

I would like to see greater circulation between and within museum collections. I'm not interested in col-
lection vanitas! In Brussels where I have been researching dormant, secondary collections, I encounter the presence of vanitas in each museum I visit. It's about cultivating exception and masterpiece value. In the minds of politicians and funding agencies, the character of a museum and its collections has to be preserved. But I would like to see more host-guest situations, where museums within a city exchange materials, are gracious in their lending of holdings that may not be top quality but can, once placed in another museum context, contribute to public education and empowerment. Today I walk out of rooms in museums in which a masterpiece is displayed like a pornographic carcass. It feels necrophiliac to revel in the consumption of one work pumped up to a value of millions. This same masterpiece will succumb to an appalling dissection of fragments and details reproduced on a gigantic marketing scale but also commercialized as fridge magnets, mugs, and silk scarves. That's exactly what I mean about scenography – a veil of historical detail and an obfuscation of the violence that accompanies this museum.

**The opportunity to sit down for several hours and study seems to be one of the aims of your design of museum-universities. Are you betting on slowness rather than speed, which Paul Virilio described as one of the perils of the contemporary, in all the movements required of us today? And how can the simultaneous insistence on slowness and mobility be understood?**

That's an interesting tension. I would like to see people sitting down to look at artworks for longer than is usual, getting out their laptops, making their own cross connections. In 2019, my students at the University of Art and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, produced what we called “Metabolic Chairs”.⁷ Members of the public could sit down in one and use a mini-projector to beam their own images onto the blank wall between paintings. We called this “spamming the hang”. It was a form of auto-curatorial intervention that actually supported the appreciation of art through adjacency. The eye would take in the paintings either side of the projection. Perhaps we can think of spending less on the shifting of major masterpieces for blockbuster exhibitions with their exorbitant insurance costs and consider another form of mobility, a local exchange of less recognized collections, an upscaling of secondary materials?

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Museum care can be seen from
a number of different points of
view, and applied in a number of
ways. If we start with ethnological
collections, part of the notion of
care is to be taken seriously in the
first degree, i.e. the challenges of
protecting objects from the tox-
ic treatments to which they have
been or may have been subjected.
Is this a real concern?

The argument of toxicity is a decoy
to prevent access. Yes, it is true that
curators at ethnographic museums
used to spray arsenic and DDT onto
the objects they brought back from
expeditions. It is likely that traces of
these poisons can be found on cer-
tain pieces more than on others. It is
the duty of the former colonial mu-
seum to do all it can to remove these
traces. The argument of toxicity is
an attempt to shift attention from
the analogue artefact to its digital
representation. Another contempo-
rary chimera is the claim that the
microbiome found in animal and
human particles located in masks or
ritual paraphernalia can unleash la-
tent diseases from the past and trigger
future pandemics. This is part of
the obfuscation produced by ethno-
graphic museums in order to keep
people out of the reserves! If toxici-
ty is present, it is up to the museum
to find a quick and efficient way to
deal with it to avoid delays in repa-
triation.⁸

You seem very concerned about
ensuring face-to-face meetings in
museum-style negotiations. Could
the museum be, and at what cost,
an agency for this kind of dia-
logue?

We've all become accustomed to
working with emails and Zoom,
and I actually appreciate this move.
However, I've always been inter-
ested in the transmission of initiate
knowledge, in those moments when
artists wish to mediate ideas to each
other or to trusted interlocutors and
not to a broad public. For this rea-
son, I produce a publishing organ
called "Metronome" that is not on-
line but simply passed from hand
to hand.⁹ It vehicles the early stag-
es of research, the foreplay of pro-
duction, and is like a code between
artists. Your question also referenc-
es the condition *after* an exhibition
is produced or a meeting has taken
place. This is what Paul Rabinow
once called "exiting the field".¹⁰ It
refers to the value placed on with-
drawal, on diffusion after the act.
Sometimes you'll find that a show
has a *finissage*, but generally, little
attention is paid to the aftermath
of an exhibition and what it implies
for the artist or the visitor. That is
why I critique the timing of curato-
rial structures such as exhibitions.
They don't make sense today and
are barely sustainable. Why stick
to a 3-month rote when other tem-
poral models can work too? What
alternative timings might be con-
sidered that could dislodge the stag-
nancy and unsustainability of this
treadmill of exhibition-making and
prove equally productive for audi-
ences?

According to you, “Today, expeditions take place in the (museum) where the aim is to understand what has been collected and why, and to discover the different paradigms that signified the research of the museum’s former directors
### and curators”.¹¹ How can we imagine staging or exhibiting the museum’s explorations in these terms?

In his recent book on Sigmund Freud’s “figurative psychoanalysis”, German historian Horst Bredekamp describes the Musée Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital as a “Bild- und Objektlabor der Psychologie” (an image and object laboratory of psychology).¹² Like Charcot, Freud also had trinkets in his library, 2-3000 pieces in total made up of Etruscan figurines, African art, and various paintings, which he began collecting during his first travels to Italy in September 1896. In Vienna, Freud knew all the antiquarians and in 1917, he writes of his “Abenteuerlust” when he visits them searching for something new. Freud gathers so many trinkets, that when he moves to a new apartment, he needs three furniture carts to transport his familiar items, or as he called them, his “Dinge der Vertrautheit”. Bredekamp claims that Freud’s collection was integral to his practice, like a medium of communication between the doctor and patient. The statuettes represented an intermediate space for the gaze of both parties, a divergent ground where their eyes could settle but never meet.

My model also requires artefacts and artworks. It is conceptual and empirical rather than academic. Imagine the wing of a museum in which the exhibition space is filled with long tables and chairs for visitors to gather, sit down, and study at their pace. Surrounding this furniture are racks with historical paintings, mobile media stations, and ar-

tefacts in vitrines that can be moved into different configurations. All artworks and objects are pulled from the oblivion of secondary museum collections. With no masterpiece value, they are revitalised into hybrid configurations, intentionally crossing cultures, disciplines, and time frames. A baroque painting, riddled with holes and cavities, too damaged to exhibit, is positioned next to an 18th century condom made from sheep's gut, embellished with an erotic drawing. Adjacent is a set of slave shackles, some elaborately engineered fish traps from Africa and Oceania, and an artwork by Andreas Slominski, which like a seductive decoy lies somewhere between a sculpture and a functional object.¹³ Such assemblages confuse the borders between art history and other disciplines, fueling new imaginative conversations based on visual relationships. The public encounters an ecology of art and ideas based on the afterlives of marginal collections and duplicate items that fill the reservoirs of every museum in Europe. The effects, both beautiful and enigmatic, offer the foundation for critical fabulations, designs, and inventions for future generations.

> This interview was made in December 2024 by Dominique Poulot, guest editor. Many thanks to Clémentine Deliss for her time and energy. The photos of the Weltkulturen Museum are the work of Wolfgang Günzel.
## Endnotes

1 Deliss 2020, p. 17.

2 Leiris 1939.

3 “Documents” 1930, p. 300.

4 Certeau 1924.

5 See *The Metabolic Museum* for the English version of “Manifesto for the rights of access to colonial collections sequestered in Western Europe”, and on the website of the journal “Multitudes” 2018.

6 Rancière 1987.

7 https://mm-u.online/project/university-of-design-hfg-karlsruhe/

8 https://www documenta14.de/en/south/456_occupy_collections_clementine_deliss_in_conversation_with_frederic_keck_on_access_circulation_and_interdisciplinary_experimentation_or_the_urgency_of_remediating_ethnographic_collections_before_it_is_really_too_late

9 “Metronome” is an artists’ and writers’ organ that is both a collective artwork and a research methodology. It was conceived in 1996 by Clémentine Deliss and has been researched and published for over ten years in a number of cities and locations in the world including Dakar, London, Berlin, Basel, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Malmö, Bergen, Frankfurt, Vienna, Biella, Edinburgh, Paris, Oregon, Tokyo and Stavanger. Acting as a critical alternative to conventional art publishing, “Metronome” operates like a prologue or creative tangent to an exhibition, generating new work and debates between artists and thereby triggering short circuits between art scenes in different locations. See the interview of Clementine Deliss in Paris INHA : https://www.canal-u.tv/chaines/inha/la-revue-critique-et-culturelle-dans-le-monde-revolution-subversion-et-emancipation-8

10 Rabinow, Stavrianakis 2019.

11 Deliss 2011, p. 201.

12 Bredekamp 2023.

13 https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/11104

## References

Deliss 2020: Deliss C., *The Metabolic Museum*, Berlin, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2020.

Leiris 1939. Leiris M., *L'âge d'homme*, Paris, Gallimard, 1939.

“Documents” 1930: “Documents” 1930, 5.

Certeau 1924: De Certeau M., *Lire: braconnage et poétique de consommateurs*, “Projet” 1978, 124, pp. 447-457.

“Multitudes” 2018: “Multitudes” 2018, 73.

Rancière 1987: Rancière J., *Le maître ignorant*, Paris, Fayard 1987.

Rabinow, Stavrianakis 2019: Rabinow P., Stavrianakis A., *Demands of the day: On the logic of anthropological inquiry*, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Deliss 2011: Deliss C., *Stored Code. Remediating Collections in a Post-ethnographic Museum*, “Project 1975”, 2011.

Bredekamp 2023: Bredekamp H., *Sigmund Freuds figürliche Psychoanalyse: Der Moses Michelangelos und die Sammlung von Idolen*, Basel, Schwabe Verlag, 2023.
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materials.

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# Unmuting musical instruments held in ethnographic collections: towards a sound remediation?

Louis Petitjean

Keywords:

Sound, Ethnographic Museums, Decolonisation, Multisensory Experience, Dissonant Heritage.

## ABSTRACT:

This paper explores the integration of sound in ethnographic museums displays as a possible way to deal with the mediation of musical instruments taken from colonised cultures. It examines museums' evolving approaches to decolonisation, particularly the incorporation of multi-sensory experiences that allow audiences to connect with heritage beyond visual displays. Museums like the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the case study of the article, attempt to address historical erasures by working with artists to create installations that let musical instruments resonate differently. By shifting the focus from preservation alone to collaborative, sensory engagements, these museums aim to repair dissonant heritages, fostering inclusivity and rethinking representation within modern museology.

Questo articolo esplora l'integrazione del suono nei musei etnografici come strategia per ridare voce agli strumenti musicali delle culture colonizzate. L'articolo esamina l'evoluzione degli approcci dei musei alla decolonizzazione, con un'attenzione particolare all'integrazione di esperienze multisensoriali che permettono al pubblico di entrare in contatto con il patrimonio culturale, al di là delle esposizioni visive. Musei come il Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, preso in esame nell'articolo, cercano di affrontare le cancellazioni storiche collaborando con gli artisti per creare installazioni che fanno risuonare gli strumenti musicali in modo diverso. Spostando l'attenzione dalla sola conservazione all'impegno collaborativo e sensoriale, questi musei mirano a riparare patrimoni dissonanti, promuovendo l'inclusività e ripensando la rappresentazione all'interno della museologia moderna.

## Opening Picture:

Fig. 02: The flutes and pipes reserve. Photo by Louis Petitjean.

Louis Petitjean

Louis Petitjean is a PhD student at Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne in cotutelle with Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, part of the UnaHerDoc programme of Una Europa, under the supervision of Dominique Poulot and Sandra Costa. His work focuses on the circulation of organological knowledge in museums at the end of the 19th century in Europe, with particular reference to Asian instruments from Indochina and Japan.

CC BY 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
©Louis Petitjean, 2025

<figure><img src="image_119.png" /></figure>
Ethnographic museums are undoubtedly going through a period of crisis. From the presentation of the ethnographic object,¹ to the discourse produced on the former acquisition methods,² as well as on practices of repatriation,³ these museums face multiple challenges. To cope up with these academic and social critiques, some of them have undertaken renovations, in response to “a need to create and disseminate a multicultural and postcolonial image of Europe, fully integrated into globalisation and interpreted as a symbol of modernity, particularly in the former colonial metropolises”.⁴ Often moved by the need of pluralisation of voices in the museum, the ethnographic museum moves towards James Clifford’s definition of the “contact zone”,⁵ i.e. an inclusive space for the co-construction of knowledge between the museum and the populations about which it produces a discourse. Thought to be in opposition to a museology inherited from colonialism and experienced as overwhelming for the populations it deals with, these museums now wish to respond to the imperatives of a decolonial museology⁶ as means of repairing the past of European empires.

The new definition of the museum, proposed in 2019 at ICOM Kyoto and voted on in 2022 at ICOM Prague, attests of this large-scale paradigm shift. A museum is, or must be, “open to the public, accessible and inclusive” and “promotes diversity and sustainability”; in addition, “museums operate and communicate ethically and professionally, with the participation of diverse communities”.⁷ Anthropologists Joachim Classen and David Howes have described European ethnographic

museums as *sensescapes*,⁸ that can be defined as places of ongoing emotional renegotiation between the institution and its public. In those museums, erected in the second half of the 19th century, the only mode of access to the objects has been the sight, at the expense of other senses, and “within the museum’s empire of sight, objects are colonized by the gaze”.⁹ These museums are experimenting with new ways of providing access to the collections, integrating the “new body of the visitor”¹⁰ in a multi-sensory way, in which sound and hearing seem to have become more and more important.

One may speak of renovation when referring to a new architectural and scenography redesign, or of a redesign when referring to a new museography. However, this concept fails to include the question of the public, even though these redesigns or renovations are often thought of as responses to the social issues that museums are engaged in tackling. An extended renovation would therefore include a renewal of the intermediary practices between the institution and its public, in other words would redefine mediation. Some of those museums are therefore engaged in what can be called *remediation*, a concept developed by the American anthropologist Paul Rabinow and defined, in the museum case, as a collaborative and dialogical process through which certain practices within the museum are “reconfigured, modified, rectified and adjusted”.¹¹ Inspired by Judith Butler’s “politics of radical resignification”¹² and Michel Foucault’s politics of discomfort, this method involves introducing alternative modes of representation into
the museum space, which can also
sometimes make visitors feel un-
comfortable.¹³

If we take the example of sound in
exhibition spaces, the first observa-
tion is that sonic practices within
museums have become common-
place, from audio guides to sound
showers and listening rooms. Inter-
est in the use of sound in exhibition
spaces appeared recently in scien-
tific literature with the emphasis on
the fact that sound develops a sense
of immediacy and participation for
the public.¹⁴ The work of museol-
ogist Julia T.S. Binter links this to
the relationship of the public with
ethnographic objects and focuses
on sound agency in the context of
the decolonisation of the museum,
investigating how sound archives
help to resist the “colonial aphasia”
from which European museums
suffer.¹⁵ Music, for its part, is an art
form that largely resists the tradi-
tional modes of access offered by
the museum. According to its defi-
nition, it is brought into the world
through bodily techniques, involv-
ing the voice or body percussions,
or techniques requiring objects and
knowledge about them. Yet *music*
as a vast and moving social and
anthropological concept has often
been cut down, within museums, to
the gathering and presentation of
collections of musical instruments,
often putting aside the theme of mu-
sic practices.

This type of collection is particularly
interesting in our case, because the
process of remediation takes place
in an original way. Often criticised
for their silence, these collections
and particularly those from non-Eu-
ropean cultures, tend to be re-ex-
amined and to break new grounds.

They are now being rethought
around a programme aiming at re-
storing their agentivity and their
capacity to generate sound, which
their existence in the museum has
made difficult or even denied. In
other words, *unmute* the instru-
ments that the museum has forced
into silence.¹⁶ This can be done in
different ways. It is often pushed
by the institution itself, by collabo-
rating with artists from source-comm-
munities negotiating an access to
the music instruments. From then,
and regarding specific conservation
needs for each type of instrument,
these artists either play them to
symbolically re-sound them, either
produce new form of discourses on
them, notably through the use of
contemporary art approaches.

Nonetheless, the process of re-sound-
ing instruments often comes up
against the demands of preventive
conservation, which has been pro-
gressively institutionalised by ICOM
through the International Centre for
the Study of the Preservation and
Restoration of Cultural Property (IC-
CROM) and the International Com-
mittee of Museums and Collections
of Instruments and Music (CIMCIM)
since the early 1960s. Even though
music instruments museums were
born in the second half of the 19th
century, the recognition of musical
instruments as proper *heritage ob-
jects*, and not as pedagogical tools
for the music academies, has been a
long process.

The CIMCIM was founded in Paris
on 1st July 1960, at the Musée des
Arts et Traditions Populaires, un-
der the leadership of Georges Hen-
ri Rivière (1897-1985). He defended
the idea that musical instruments
were an integral part of humanity's
material culture and that museums should start treating them as such. Indeed, as the official history of the CIMCIM states, “musical instruments have not always been respected as part of our cultural heritage, but rather as a tool in the service of music”,¹⁷ often leading to deterioration or renovations that altered the instruments. The committee set up a think-tank on instrument conservation and restoration which led to the publication in 1985 of the *Recommendations for regulating access to musical instruments in public collections*.¹⁸ The researcher Judith Dehail has shown how, in this process, the musical instrument has gone from being an “intermediary or tool for producing the authentic music of the past, to becoming an end in itself, whose materiality crystallises, and therefore documents, the authenticity of the past”.¹⁹ This also implies a broader distance with the instrument: according to the ideals of conservation, it must be touched the least possible, paradoxically reinforcing its muteness within collection storages.

What is at stake here is therefore the tension between, on the one hand, the need and the institutional organisation to protect musical instruments from time and destruction, so to speak preserving their “still life”,²⁰ and on the other hand the wish to repair them symbolically by proposing a new way of mediating them. Without opposing the two binarily, we want to address how museum practices are entangled with social agendas as well as with its own functioning as an institution. By giving examples of *sound remediation practices* currently held in Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (MQB) and in different European

museums during the recent years, this article will attempt to address this duality of sound remediation. It will touch on the different ways in which collections of non-European musical instruments can be repaired and investigate to what extent sound is a powerful tool for repairing ethnographic museums themselves, notably by putting their relationship with their own pasts and collection histories on the table. The exploration of the interactions between institutions and artists shall shed light on the complex ecologies of the museum and the effects they have on repairing processes. How can the museum provide access to musical instruments that have been uprooted nay imprisoned in analytical categories inherited from nineteenth-century colonial anthropology? How can it meet the demands of modern, critical museology in the case of musical instruments that have been silenced by history? Can sound be used to write new narratives in museums?

The study is based on ethnographic methods, relying on multi-sited observation within the walls of the museum and a total of six interviews. The first section of the interviews has been made with the museum staff, conducted between December 2023 and March 2024. The three profiles are quite different. Our first contact with the museum was made through an interview with a production manager, in the exhibition service department. The second interviewee is responsible for the sound collection of the museum and was thus a very important informer for the project. The third interview was made with the former director of the MQB auditorium, who worked within the cultural programme de-
partment (live arts, cinema, confer-
ences). She had worked a lot on the
*Musée Résonnant* project which we
will discuss later. The position of
the researcher involved a regular
presence in the museum. As being
external to the workings of the mu-
seum itself, it rendered possible a
comparison between observations
made in the exhibition spaces with
the internal discourse produced on
them. The second section of the in-
terviews, conducted from March
to September 2024, was made with
artists involved in “sound remedi-
ation” within ethnographic muse-
ums. An interview with the artist
who created our case study, Youm-
na Saba, was compulsory. Yet in or-
der to understand the larger scale
of the phenomenon, two other in-
terviews were conducted with art-
ists working in different countries
than France, with different insti-
tutional contexts, like Adilia Ying
Dip in Brussels and Sacht Hoyt in
Berlin. Acknowledging the fact
that art works are not the creation
of isolated individuals but result
from cooperation between differ-
ent artists, institutions, critics and
audiences, who together make up
the “art world”,²¹ it was necessary
to multiply the points of views and
complete them with observations,
in order to grasp the complexity of
an artistic project taking place in a
major Parisian museum, involving
various actors, intermediaries and
interests.

After rapidly telling the place of
musical instruments within ethno-
graphic collections, we shall look at
the new role given to sound in the
MQB. The third part will focus on
the artistic installation *La réserve*
*des non-dits* by the Franco-Lebanese
artist Youmna Saba, winner of the

first sound residency of the muse-
um.

Music instruments in ethnographic museums

1) Organology, museums and mu-
sic instrument collections in con-
temporary history

The last quarter of the 19th century
in Western Europe saw a great in-
terest in non-European musical in-
struments, manifested in the build-
ing of collections and the opening of
museums. For example, the Musée
des Instruments de Musique du Con-
servatoire Royal in Brussels opened
in 1877, following the donation of a
large Indian collection to King Leo-
pold II. In Paris, the Musée des In-
struments de musique du Conserva-
toire had already existed since 1861,
and the Musée d'Ethnographie du
Trocadéro opened in 1878, initially
comprising 150 instruments from
Africa and Oceania²². At the same
time, organology, the science of mu-
sical instruments, began to devel-
op. This interrelated discipline of
musicology enjoys a symbiotic re-
lationship with museums,²³ which
functioned as laboratories. These
musical artifacts, preserved and ex-
hibited, were mobilized by contem-
poraries as levers enabling them to
build classification systems marked
by the evolutionary paradigm, cat-
egorizing “specimens”, “families”
and “branches”, largely marked by
the epistemology of natural scienc-
es. In 1878, Victor-Charles Mahillon
(1841-1924), the first curator of the
museum in Brussels, drew up the
first major classification into four
families of instruments, divided ac-
cording to the way they set the air
<figure><img src="image_120.png" /></figure>

into vibration: aerophones, cordo-
phones, idiophones, membrano-
phones.²⁴ This fourfold classification
became the basis for the one still in
use today after its systematisation in
1914 by two German scholars.²⁵ Re-
cent work has shown that organolo-
gy, along with ethnomusicology af-
terwards, have played a large part
in the process of “primitivization”
of non-European music, defined as
the assignment of “certain musical
repertoires, carried by living popu-
lations, to an anhistoricity, a place
below history. These are distin-
guished from a ‘modern’ repertoire,
whose progress the comparative
history of music, and later musicol-

ogy, endeavours to describe”.²⁶ Born
in the heart of imperialist Europe in
the last quarter of the 19th century,
this science relied heavily on coloni-
al and diplomatic networks to trans-
fer instruments to the metropolises,
where it was written.

In 1929, at the request of Georges Henri Rivière, André Schaeffner founded what will become the department of Ethnomusicology within the ethnographic museum, which became in 1937 the Musée de l'Homme. The Hornbostel and Sachs typological classification was applied to the instrument collection of this museum.

In 2006, the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac was created by the merger of the collections of the Musée de l'Homme with Rivière's Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires. The museum's collection of musical instruments now totals 10,000 pieces, most of which come from the Musée de l'Homme's ethnomusicological laboratory.²⁷ This brief detour into the history of organological classification is necessary to understand the current arrangements for the mediation of these instruments at the Musée du Quai Branly. In fact, the presentation still uses the “organological mode”,²⁸ using a label for each display case and explaining which object class the instrument belongs to (Fig. 1). Even if this mode of presentation is not properly a colonial reenactment, the profusion of objects in the museum was made possible by the very colonial context of imperial France, and the pregnancy of organological settings within the museum dispositive seems to be currently discussed, modified and remediated.

**Fig. 01:**
An organologi-
cal cartel on the
glass tower.
Photo Louis Petit-
jean.
As a good witness of the contemporaneity of this process, the Musée de la Musique in Paris is planning to renovate its permanent exhibition space which until now has been called “Les musiques du monde” (World music) due to open in May 2025. In its *Projet Scientifique et Culturel* (2020-2025), in a section entitled “A museum in the present”, the museum declares its desire to “think about Western music in a globalised world”; the three aspects of this renovation include a reorganisation of the display, an easier access to the collections which until now have been at the end of the museum’s route and an emphasis on “the experience of the intangible within the museum and a more sensitive approach to the collections”.²⁹

## 2) Mute instruments in silent storages

Museums seem to have been a powerful tool to mute musical instruments. Scholars have even provocatively described them as “mausoleums, places for the display of the musically dead, with organologists acting as morticians, preparing dead instrument bodies for preservation and display”.³⁰ If we take the example of MQB, these thousands of musical instruments collected since the 19th century are in full view for the museum visitors to the museum, housed in a huge glass tower that acts as the backbone of the museum. One of the few articles on the subject, written by Madeleine Leclerc, ethnomusicologist and director of MQB’s musical instrument collections from the museum’s opening until 2012, reveals a great deal about the initial ambitions for this glass tower. According

to her report, there were originally ten screens inside, connected to the outside by transducers that broadcasted musical extracts. The aim was “to create a link between the formal aesthetics of musical instruments [...] and the musical aesthetics sought by instrument makers”.³¹ Today, this original ambition is not there, and the instruments are only accessible via organological labels such as the one shown above. On the top of that, Jean Nouvel’s architectural project comprised this glass tower in the concrete structure itself and therefore it cannot be modulated. The tower seems to resist to a radical change of its display, utility and accessibility.

In contrast to the exhibition platform, this tower takes on a special museological form as it displays a part of the museum’s reserves. The display of backstages, the *behind the scenes* of museums is a relatively recent phenomenon. It calls to another type of museological discourse: the revealing of what is not visible, what is hidden, what refers to the inner workings of the museum. However, we should not “take the media productions of institutions as descriptions of the work of collections management but treat them for what they are: selective and partial representations of the museum’s activities”.³² The display of these musical instruments is inseparable from the institution that has given them heritage status and is part of the range of discourses it produces about its collections. Given that the museum does not have any ethnomusicologist in its staff since 2016, this staging of conservation no longer coincides with the reality of curatorial work.
Yet, there has also been a shift in the way museum staff perceive this space, as evidenced by the way they talk about it. During fieldwork, a museum employee explained that they were told not to use the originating term “silo” anymore, but rather “instrument tower”, before using the term again later in the interview, by mistake, indicating that a lexicon linked to representations of this facility within the museum had become imbued and thus resistant to change.

As Youmna Saba puts it, “it was very beautiful to see all these instruments, but at the same time, it was very shocking to see them placed like that in this tower. There’s something borderline violent about it”.³³ As a whole, the public seems to be calling for more direct access to these collections and are expressing a form of frustration at the glass tower housing objects whose potential for sound they are aware of, but which are confined to being merely looked at. Eric de Visscher,³⁴ who has played a major role in the project we will discuss afterwards, states this:

> "This inaudible of a collection of instruments is always there, we're always fighting against it and the public also asks: 'we want to hear the instruments, why don't we play them?' Or 'these are dead instruments!'"³⁵

Of course, forms of sound mediation for musical instrument exist in the museum, but that follow a direct illustrative approach. If a flute

is shown in a display case, then the sound shower next to it will broadcast a recording of the flute in question, or of a similar flute. So, what can be done to give access in a different way to musical instruments that are fixed and rendered mute in their display case? Although there is no public survey as such on this question, the museum has been reacting for some years now by proposing an overall overhaul of the way sound is perceived and lived within the museum's walls. In short, MQB is trying to make a sound mediation.

## Towards “resonating” museums?

### 1) New echoes within the walls

In 2020, the former Director of the Heritage and Collections Department, Yves Le Fur, launched an audit for a major project, the *Musée Résonnant* (resonating museum).³⁶ It has been led by Eric de Visscher, whose expertise today coincides with the up-to-date sensory and sound approaches in museums. Starting from the observation that the museum is a multi-sensory space and that its architecture is designed “more like a territory where the visitor wanders through spaces of very different sizes and volumes, and therefore with different acoustics”,³⁷ Eric de Visscher has proposed solutions to redefine the place of sound in the exhibition area and to enhance the value of intangible heritage. In an approach rooted in critical museology, he has developed the idea that sound design can be a highly effective tool for developing new narratives in museums:

**Fig. 03: The virtual “manta balanga” to be found on RMCA’s ReSoXY website.**
"As something that is fleet-
ing but that also is physi-
cal and spatial, felt in the
body, and connected to
concepts and politics of the
voice, vocality, and mem-
ory, sound is suited for
prompting questions, for
destabilizing that which is
thought to be stable, and
for re-examining what we
think we know."³⁸

The project is therefore to some ex-
tent a practical application of this
theorisation of the power of sound
within the exhibition spaces of the
MQB.

This ambitious project is cross-dis-
ciplinary and wishes to include the
museum's various departments:
public relations, cultural devel-
opment, heritage and collections,
technical resources and security...
It therefore needs a reconfigura-
tion of museum practices and great-
er cooperation. Nevertheless, the
lack of clear steering of the project
between the departments leaves a
wide degree of freedom and inter-
pretation adapted to the human and
financial potential of each. The de-
partments that are already closely
involved in the issue of sound, such
as the media library, are very com-
mitted to the programme. This pro-
ject is not without confronting the
reality of differing budgets allocat-
ed to the departments, depending
on their size and importance with-
in the museum. As one member of
staff explains:

"The most frustrating thing, the most complicated thing to manage, is that

we have a lot of depart-
ments, and each of the de-
partments is involved with
a totally different budget
and human resources, or
even very, very, very dif-
ferent budgets. [...] No
one has ever complained
about it, as it's not visible
[to the public], everyone,
with their own resources,
programmes very differ-
ent things."³⁹

In fact, the aim of the project is to
extend into many areas of the mu-
seum. It also takes the form of a par-
ticular focus on the issue of sound
for the public, which has taken the
form of “experiments on the per-
ception of sounds in the museum by
and with the public”, as well as an
acoustic study “to find out how this
building reacts to the issue of sound,
as well as to noise pollution”.⁴⁰ And
finally, the most visible form of this
new resonance of the museum is the
setting up of a sound residency con-
sisting of a series of *cartes blanches*
given to contemporary sound art-
ists. The *Musée Résonnant* is there-
fore a wide-ranging, shape-shifting
project and refers as much to sound
understood as a material reality
and an aspect of human culture as
to a lived experience in a museum.

The sound residencies consist of in-
viting sound artists and musicians
to create a work with and for the
museum. These *cartes blanches* are
also part of a recent museum dy-
namic that outsources mediation
through contemporary creation,
calling on intermediaries to take an-
other look at the collections. Faced
with demands for restitution and
the proliferation of critical studies
on the museum, the aim is to give
back symbolic power to artists from
non-European cultures, by letting
them take over the museum and its
collections:

"Because we are not able to return the objects, which are moreover most of the time not requested, the idea is rather to give a free rein to an artist [...], to make the objects or collections available for artists who come from those cultures."⁴¹

The idea of a carte blanche given to
a single artist also fits in with the
museum's consideration of artists'
self-representation in the museum,
in a model that encourages them to
invest the museum and integrate its
various components into their art-
tistic approach. It also brings into
play the question of contemporary
art at the MQB. Given the relative
slowness with which major Parisian
contemporary art institutions, such
as the Palais de Tokyo and the Fon-
dation Cartier, begin to integrate
sound art into their collections, this
program is also a way of positioning
the museum in the context of the
growing interest for sound art in
the artistic field:

"Quite quickly, we decided
that a residency program,
in other words, a commis-
sion for works of art, but
conceived from and for the
museum, was a good way
to build up a collection
of contemporary works

of sound art on the same
model as photographic
residencies."⁴²

2) Sound exits the museum

Resonating museums seem to be a
broader phenomenon than what
is happening in MQB. Other forms
of remediation of musical instru-
ments collected during the colonial
periods and rendered mute by their
existence within the museum are
sprouting.

Launched by the percussionist
and researcher Dr. Adilia Dip, the
project entitled “Re-Sounding the
xylophone collection of Royal Mu-
seum for Central Africa (RMCA)”⁴³
(ReSoXy) is being developed in the
walls of the RMCA in Tervuren, Bel-
gium. It focuses on unmuting its
xylophone collection, comprising
159 instruments, mainly collected
between the end of the 19th century
and the early 20th century. Deeply
rooted in Belgium colonial history
in Congo, as it was created in 1897
following the colonial part of the
Universal Exhibition taking place
in Tervuren, the museum increased
its collections through great collec-
tors such as Armand Hutereau, who
picked up more than 600 instru-
ments alongside with sound record-
ings and photographs during his
1911-1913 expedition.

Just like Quai Branly, RMCA seems
to lack of “experts in-house that
can repair the physical objects”.⁴⁴
Therefore, the repairing process
cannot be focused on the material-
ity of the musical instrument, but
rather on the sound and the intan-
gible musical practices. The process
is the following: after having sound
sampled the xylophones, they are
synthetised and could be replayed
during live performances. This sym-
bolically means that the sound is
being freed up while the objects are
still being captive within museum
reserves.

For this project, the sound reme-
diation does not only include the
recording of the sounds of the in-
struments: it also encompasses a
digitalised manza playable directly
on the website (Fig. 3), a demonstra-
tion of a musical pattern extracted
from RMCA's archive, various pho-
tos, a data record with precise in-
formation on the origins of the ob-
ject (culture of origin, acquisition
date and collecting method, collec-
tor and acquisition location), au-
dio-samples downloadable freely of
various audio formats, and extracts
of the museum archive recordings.
Digitalisation is therefore one way
of dealing with the issue of the re-
pairing museum by making acces-
sible to visitors in and outside the
museum: this digitalised manza is
currently inside the exposition area
of the RMCA.

At the very core of the ReSoXy pro-
ject is the idea that by digitalising
the xylophone collection, the mu-
seum could be a good purveyor of
cultural information that colonial
collects have sometimes deleted:

"Because we want to reach out to
the communities, we want them to
know these instruments again, be-
cause some of these instruments
are not in use anymore. Especially
the communities in Congo. But of
course, it's difficult when the in-
struments are not in use, and it's
already for decades in this circle of
disappearance."⁴⁵

Manza MO.0.0.14308

Jouer de l'instrument virtuel

<figure><img src="image_121.png" /></figure>

Cliquez ici pour jouer en pleine fenêtre

Cliquez sur les touches pour entendre le son du xylophone. Il fonctionne à la fois sur les ordinateurs de bureau et sur les appareils à écran tactile.

As part of the project was the trips
of the “re-sounder” artist and re-
searcher to meet the source-com-
munities whose ancestors were
dispossessed of these objects. Dr.
Adilia Dip explains that, when in
Congo, all her work was what could
be given back to the communities.
This new accessibility of sound re-
cordings, instruments and archives
could therefore produce new music:

"When I was in Congo
and I needed something
to show them. I could not
just show them some old
recordings made hundred
years ago. So now I have
an object to do knowledge
exchange and then they
might start to remember
more, or they can create
new music together."⁴⁶

Therefore, musical co-creation is
one of the tools museums deploy to
repair their difficult histories. It can
also take other forms.

Youmna Saba's La reserve des non-dits or sound remediation for MQB's tower

1) Making the unheard listened

The first winner of MQB's sound resi-
dency program was Youmna Saba,
a contemporary Lebanese artist.
Youmna Saba is a composer, virtuo-
so oud player and musicologist and
her albums explore the relationship
between electroacoustic music and
the sung Arabic language. Her pro-
ject La Réserve des non-dits (the Re-
serve of the Unsaid) won the selec-
tion competition for the first sound
residency in the Quai Branly's carte
blanche program. Her installation
was on view from March to De-
cember 2023. The selection encom-
passed artists "from one of the four
continents represented in the Musée
du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac col-
lections: Africa, Asia, America, Oce-
ania"⁴⁷ that had to propose a project
interacting with the museum and
its collections. Whether "the mu-
seum as a place, the museum as a
presentation centre or the museum
as a centre for the conservation of
archives and works",⁴⁸ priority was
given to projects that made organic
use of the museum, including a me-
diation and installation proposal.
Artists could choose to base their
work on the sound and audiovisual
collection, the musical instrument
collection, or both. Successful art-
ists are given around six months to
work and receive technical support
from Le Fresnoy, a Tourcoing-based
national studio for contemporary
arts. Winners also receive finan-

cial support to develop the project,
to the tune of €8,000, which “cov-
ers the copyright remunerating
the winner’s work, the entry of the
work into the museum’s collections
and the delivery of the final work
(digital file or any other format)”⁴⁹.
In addition, the various expenses
associated with the production are
covered by the museum (material
costs, travel expenses, costs of using
non-free sources, etc.).

Youmna Saba's project was based on
the intuition that the instruments in
the tower, despite their apparent si-
lence behind the glass, nevertheless
produced almost inaudible sounds
generated by the circulation of air
on the membranes. This is part of
her artistic quest to question the au-
dible and the inaudible. For exam-
ple, as part of the Taïma project at
the CNCM Césaré in Reims, she gave
a concert in which she placed an oud
on a chair in the middle of the stage
and connected microphones to pick
up the resonance of the strings and
the cabinet, subverting resonance as
a traditional problem in live mixing
by transforming it into a musical el-
ement that forms an integral part of
the work. With the same ambition,
her project in the museum aimed
to capture hidden resonances using
small microphones placed at differ-
ent points on the instrument. She
created a bank of 139 sounds from
recordings made in the glass tower's
storeroom. These recordings are di-
vided into three categories: "ambi-
ent" sounds, captured in the reso-
nance boxes of certain instruments;
"instrumental" sounds, captured
by microphones placed inside the
instruments; "optimised" sounds,
reworked in the studio in post-pro-
duction. The title of the work is a
challenge to this glass tower, which
struggles to make its presence felt and refers to the silence emanating from the reserve compared with their dense and very diverse cultural histories.

## 2) Issues of accessibility

The sound project and its implementation for the visitor were conceived synchronously. The device was distributed over three areas of the museum. Mounted on the windows of the instrument tower and on three floors of the museum, three listening points could be activated by the visitor. As the tower is at the heart of Jean Nouvel's architecture, the listening points brightened up the exhibition route. A further five listening points were installed in the collections area to punctuate the tour with sound pieces. To make the artistic process more accessible, MQB's "boîte à musique" brought together personal notes from the artist and questions about the day-to-day realisation of her project. In the form of a diagram, visitors were provided with explanations of the artist's work that were not easily understood by simply encountering the sound works, which at first sight are rather unsettling because they are taking the form of rhythmless ambient music, unveiling sometimes dark and gloomy atmospheres. This contradicts what the visitor might expect from a sound mediation of musical instruments, namely an extract of their sound in a playing context.

Enhancing the value of the tower was a major challenge. Faced with the dual question of “how do we [...] make it understandable that we are giving something to hear and leave it to the public to activate what they

hear?”,⁵⁰ the museum proposed a signage system in the form of a hand, suggesting a new way of “touching” the instruments on the other side of the glass, through listening. Visitors had to activate the device themselves by pressing a hand-shaped sticker on the glass wall of the storage room (Fig. 4). It was also necessary to highlight the tower within the museum route, which seems to hide its contents from view: of the three listening points attached to the tower, two are outside the collections area, one in the entrance hall, the other in the basement, in the educational and theatre areas. In other words, these are areas where the public does not linger. However, the absence of a tool to evaluate public use of the installation meant that it was impossible to know to what extent it really worked.

The superimposition of Youmna Sa-ba's installation and the traditional mediation devices of organological cartels, as well as their upholding in contrast to the artist's ephemer-

<figure><img src="image_122.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 04:** Front installation in the main hall. Photo Louis Petitjean</figcaption></figure>
al installation, invites to question
the persistence of the organological
mode within the museum's pres-
tentation of musical instruments. Re-
garding that, while she was working
on the micro-sounds of the instru-
ment inside the tower, she declares
she had “forget” about organology:

"Is there a way to organ-
ize them differently? Or
should we? Should we or-
ganize them or not? Be-
cause I perceived them
completely... I completely
forgot about organology
when I was working in
[the glass tower]. [...] I just
looked at where I could
place the microphone and
listened, and that was
that. Outside of all the pro-
jections, all the organiza-
tions and all the notions
that we can place on these
objects."⁵¹

One way to cure instruments seems
therefore to make them thinkable
outside the classification paradigm.

3) Sound ecology of the museum

The conservation constraints at
Quai Branly are quite strict, and the
curators themselves no longer have
direct access to the storerooms,
having to go through the collections
management to do so. Although re-
cently, Pakistani and Cameroonian
artists Ashraf Sharif Khan and Blick
Bassy were able to play on some of
the instruments in the collection,
the access to the instrument tower
is fairly restricted. To ensure that
the artist respected this rule, Youm-

na Saba was always accompanied
by someone when she was in the
musical instrument storeroom:

"Sometimes it was the assistant director of the collections department. Youmna often talks about it. They really had an almost friendly relationship. It worked very well between them, even though you could imagine they had slightly different interests. [...] Sometimes it was one of the security staff who accompanied her. In particular, she describes the behaviour of one of them, who was a bit... You know, when you're nervous and you move your leg... he did this, and it created a sort of vibration. She picked up the vibration."⁵²

Initially intended as a means of
ensuring that the artist creative
process was in line with curatorial
requirements, this “dispositive of
control” has been distorted and is
now part of the sound work itself.
To create her work, the artist drew
on the museum’s complex ecology,
ie. the network of links produced by
the iterative interactions between
humans and non-humans within
it. In this respect, the collection of
musical instruments is a boundary-work,⁵³ as it brings together actors from different social worlds
and interests and calls, through its
very materiality, for cooperation
and interaction. This ecology is also
revealed by this anecdote:
"The first thing the curatorial team told me was that sometimes in the silo, as the carts pass by, the gongs start to move. In fact, there's a lot of movement due to the metal planks, which sometimes create an orchestra of gongs. I recreated this phenomenon without touching the gongs. We just touched the shelf, applied a little pressure and the gongs began to move and bang against each other. I captured that and kept it as a composition."⁵⁴

To finish with, the technical means of developing this project were also framed by the museum. The artist had to draw a list of her technical needs prior to her first enter in the glass tower. As she explains, the “gear has dictated the frequencies I picked up. Therefore, if there had been other equipment, that picked up other frequencies, the project would have been different”.⁵⁵ The remediation is therefore unthinkable outside the museum socio-technical scope and framework.

### 4) Twisting patrimonialisation

To finish with, we mentioned above that the residency programme was part of the objective of bringing sound works into the museum's sound library. Again, the idea of the museum's patrimonialisation of the works can be traced back to the dynamics of assimilation that haunt ethnographic museums: “[Quai Branly Museum] wanted the sound bank to be in the museum, to belong

to the museum. And that, I think, is... No, at some point you have to stop”.⁵⁶ To get around this, the artist insisted on registering the 139 recordings under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0 DEED licence, which allows the work to be shared, remixed, transformed, used or copied in any format or medium, for any purpose, including commercial. This was for her, “the most important thing, for the future developments of the project”.⁵⁷ It was negotiated with the museum’s legal department, who initially objected on two grounds. One declared reason was the “desire to protect Youmna’s and the museum’s credit on the finished product, on the files”⁵⁸, and the other was that this form of licensing would allow the work to be reused for commercial purposes, thus indirectly allowing public money to fund music production that would enrich private interests. Yet, as one member of the museum commented, “given the nature of the sounds, I don’t think we’re going to make a commercial hit [...]. I don’t think Beyoncé or Rihanna would take all this and make money out of it”.⁵⁹ To conclude with the artist own words, she “did not repair anything, unfortunately” but managed to “put the sound bank in the Creative Commons. And this is a victory for me, to give access to something, something so ephemeral and so free”.⁶⁰ On the museum’s website, the artist justifies her approach by explaining what this free access to the sound art collection would be used for:

> "A renewable and ever-expanding resource; an invitation to musicians and composers to explore this
resource as a raw mate-
rial for creation, and also
to researchers to rethink
these instruments in terms
of their current state and
behaviour, and to re-ex-
amine conservation prac-
tices and the criteria un-
derlying research in mu-
sicology, organology and
lute-making.”⁶¹

Conclusion. Sonic discourse, her-
itage discourse

In this article, we exemplified one of
the many responses of ethnograph-
ic museums to the question of their
relationship with their objects and
histories. Faced with institutional
demands for restitution and writing
of new narratives, these museums
are developing alternatives, taking
the form of new mediations. Sound
is being increasingly considered as
a means of providing access to vis-
itors. Maybe because it doesn't say
anything, sound infiltrates more
easily the space of exhibition halls,
allows a freer interpretation, and
resonates with individual sensibili-
ties.

In this respect, the example of the
remediation of collections of musi-
cal instruments “silenced” by their
conservation speaks for itself. The
museum wants to give a free hand
to another voice, perhaps switch-
ing legitimacy, to produce an ar-
tistic-cum-scientific discourse, one
that moves away from the organo-
logical considerations that stored
the instruments, symbolically and
physically, in categories. These
new voices aim at capturing their
intimate life in a museum ecology
that posits itself as a constant dia-
logue between humans and non-hu-

mans, between security guards and
drums, between carts and curators,
between publics and storage. There-
fore, the development of sound
practices seems to be a plausible
way of dealing with the challenges
posed by the decolonial agenda.

To go further, we can also say that *remediation* is a concept borrowed to the ecological and biological concept of *phytoremediation*, defined as “the use of green plants and their associated microbiota, soil amendments and use of agronomic techniques to remove, contain or render harmless environmental contaminants”.⁶² The parallel with the ecology of the museum mentioned before is relevant as sound remediation also uses the multilayered dynamics of an ecological environment, here the museum, to give an answer to the broad treatment of difficult heritage.⁶³

However, we can see that the new
way of accessing these instruments
is also a new form of museum dis-
course, adapted to the current re-
flections of museums interrogating
their relationships with the visitor
senses, which does not resolve cer-
tain aporias inherent to the history
of the institutions. The cross-centu-
ry ghost of museum colonial assimil-
lations, here for example in the case
of the sound works, remains. Fur-
thermore, with the relative absence
of qualified scientific staff for these
instruments, the collection could
only be interpreted by artists pro-
posing an aesthetic discourse, re-ac-
tivating the longstanding critic on
the aestheticization of collections
of non-European objects. Converse-
ly, some radical positions towards
ethnographic museums, so to speak
critical practices of unmuting, fol-
lowing the approach of the artist Sacht Hoyt, are not interested in collaborating with museums, but rather using the museum as a means of producing engaged art. To conclude with Hoyt's own words:

"The thing is, [unmuting] is like going and having a drink with somebody who's in jail and making them feel like you've got some kind of a solution to take them back out into freedom. But you don't. [...] The only thing I can set free is the sound."⁶⁴
Endnotes

1 Gruénais, Ferry 1990, p. 7.

2 Brulon Soares, Leshchenko 2018.

3 Bienkowski 2015.

4 Van Geert 2020, p. 137.

5 Clifford 1997.

6 Grewcock 2014; Bergeron, Rivet 2021.

7 ICOM website, https://icom.museum/fr/ressources/normes-et-lignes-directrices/
definition-du-musee/.

8 Classen, Howes 2020, p. 199.

9 Classen, Howes 2020, p. 200.

10 Macdonald 1993.

11 Rabinow 2007, cited in Deliss 2020, p. 31.

12 Olson, Worsham 2007.

13 See for example the project "Curating discomfort" developed by the Hunterian
Museum and the University of Glasgow, https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/about/changing-
museum/curating-discomfort/.

14 Bubaris 2014.

15 Binter 2014.

16 See for example, in MARKK museum in Hamburg, the 2024 temporary exhibition « Un-Muting – Sonic Restitutions », https://markk-hamburg.de/en/ausstellungen/un-muting-sonic-restitutions.

17 CIMCIM website, http://cimcim.mini.icom.museum/homepage-2/cimcim-history/
history-first-years, consulted.

18 Hellwig et al. 1985.

19 Dehail 2022, p. 131.

20 Dominguez Rubio 2020.

21 Becker 1982.

22 Leclair 2003, p. 2.

23 Dehail 2019, p. 783.

24 Mahillon 1878.

25 Hornbostel, Sachs 1914.

26 Mayaud 2018, p. 126.

27 Currently, the database mentions 9117 entries in the inventory with the mention « instruments de musique », https://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/explorer-les-collections/base/Work/action/list?tx_mqbcollection_explorer%5Bclose%5D=1&cHash=177e964e8a5be6c85c9fb2f5cf80bbd2.

28 Gérard 2014.

29 *Projet scientifique et culturel du musée de la Musique de Paris* (2020-2025), Paris, Cité de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris, 2019, p. 38.

30 Bates 2012, p. 365.

31 Leclair 2007, pp. 30-39.

32 Kreplak 2021, p. 205.
33 Interview with Youmna Saba, 23/05/2024.

34 Eric de Visscher is a trained musicologist and exhibition curator, former director of Paris' Musée de la Musique (2006-2017) and currently working at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, as part of the research project entitled “Sound in Museums: New Engagements, New Tools, New Audiences”. See https://www.vam.ac.uk/research/projects/sound-in-museums-new-engagements-new-tool-new-audiences.

35 Remark of Eric de Visscher in the interview for the website *Hémisphère son, Youmna Saba dans la tour des instruments du monde* – https://hemisphereson.com/youmna-saba-dans-la-tour-des-instruments-du-monde.

36 The project is still underway at the time of writing.

37 Remark of Eric de Visscher in the interview for the website *Hémisphère son, Youmna Saba dans la tour des instruments du monde* – https://hemisphereson.com/youmna-saba-dans-la-tour-des-instruments-du-monde/.

38 Candela, de Visscher 2023, p. 57.

39 Interview with the responsible of the museum's sound collection, 13/02/2024.

40 Remark of Christine Drouin, director of Cultural Development, in the interview for the website *Hémisphère son, Youmna Saba dans la tour des instruments du monde* – https://hemisphereson.com/youmna-saba-dans-la-tour-des-instruments-du-monde/.

41 Interview with the former director of the MQB auditorium, 05/03/2024.

42 Interview with the former director of the MQB auditorium, 05/03/2024.

43 See https://resoxy.africamuseum.be/.

44 Interview with Adilia Ying Dip, 17/09/2024.

45 Interview with Adilia Ying Dip, 17/09/2024.

46 Interview with Adilia Ying Dip, 17/09/2024.

47 MQB, 2024-2025 call for the sound residency, p. 7., https://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/collections/toutes-les-collections/residences-sonores/appel-a-projets-residence-sonore.

48 Interview with an exhibition production manager, 02/02/2024.

49 MQB, 2024-2025 call for the sound residency, p. 7.

50 Interview with an exhibition production manager, 02/02/2024.

51 Interview with Youmna Saba, 23/05/2024.

52 Interview with the responsible of the museum's sound collection, 13/02/2024.

53 Star, Griesmer 1989.

54 Remark of Youmna Saba in the interview for the website *Hémisphère son, Youmna Saba dans la tour des instruments du monde* – https://hemisphereson.com/youmna-saba-dans-la-tour-des-instruments-du-monde/.

55 Interview with Youmna Saba, 23/05/2024.

56 Interview with Youmna Saba, 23/05/2024.

57 Interview with Youmna Saba, 23/05/2024.

58 Interview with the responsible of the museum's sound collection, 13/02/2024.

59 Interview with the responsible of the museum's sound collection, 13/02/2024.

60 Interview with Youmna Saba, 23/05/2024.
61 Extract from MQB's website, « La réserve comme ressource(s) », https://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/collections/vie-des-collections/actualites/residence-sonore/residence-sonore-2022-youmna-saba.

62 Das 2018, p. 192.

63 Macdonald 2008.

64 Interview with Sacht Hoyt, 14/06/2024.

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Previous volumes:

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Vol. 1 No. 1 (2024)
Exhibited Thoughts of Architecture

Edited by Anna Rosellini

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Vol. 1 No. 2 (2024)
Rimozioni, Cancellazioni, Trasformazioni. Politica culturale e memoria monumentale

Edited by Marco Pizzo
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MMD - Museum, Materials and Discussions. Journal of Museum Studies is an open-access academic journal in English, French, and Italian, devoted to museology, museography, Cultural Heritage as well as research on audiences and fruition with an international outlook, addressing both the life of museum institutions and collections, and the latest challenges they face in their broad cultural and social dimension.

MMD aims at promoting and enhancing the collaboration among researchers from the field of humanities, social sciences, architecture, and Digital Humanities through their complementary perspectives. It is addressed to scholars, students and professionals working in these specific disciplinary fields, but also readers interested in the current evolution of the debate on issues, methods and tools related to the material and immaterial aspects of museology in its relation to history and contemporaneity, and in connection with the progress of public welfare.

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