Presentation of the Mucem/Iméra research residency
The Mucem/Iméra residency is open to artists, researchers in the humanities and social sciences and professionals in museology and heritage.
With particular attention to the Mediterranean dimension and to interdisciplinary research, this immersion residency at the Mucem opens up to research carried out from its collections and documentary funds. In the case of artists, it is presented as a starting point for artistic research, making it possible to rethink the interventions of artists in civilization museums, to rethink the link between artistic works and anthropological objects, etc.
Three main scientific axes thus open up:
– Explorations of museographic spaces
This axis invites a specific reading of the Mediterranean Gallery or the Witness Apartment, as well as related museographic interventions (mediation devices, performances or performed conferences, publications, etc.
- The Galerie de la Méditerranée is the semi-permanent exhibition space of the Mucem.
- The “witness apartment” of the Mucem Conservation and Resource Center is a reserve accessible to the public which presents a sample of the collections. This makes it possible to understand the typological diversity of the funds, as well as their principles of constitution, intellectual classification and material conservation. These funds constitute a documentary resource open to the re-reading of the human and social sciences as well as a breeding ground for forms and poetic emergences.
– Study, enrichment and proofreading of collections and documentary funds
This axis concerns a very wide variety of subjects due to the richness of the Mucem’s funds, which are increased regularly.
- The collections and resources kept in the reserves are rich with a million diversified items: 250,000 objects, 350,000 photographs, 100,000 posters and prints, 100,000 postcards, 1 linear km of archives (sound, audio-visual , paper…) They include a French and European ethnographic collection documenting popular uses, practices, cultures and arts (19th-20th centuries), extended to urban anthropology of the 20th and 21st centuries, then on a Mediterranean scale since the 2000s. These collections are organized around thematic areas (performing arts; religions and beliefs; public life; sport and health; crafts; trade; industry; mobility; interbreeding and communication; domestic life; body; appearances and sexuality; agriculture and food; art contemporary; history of the museum);
- Two multi-year research programs aim to analyze and enrich the collections.
– Museology and museography
This theme invites critical reflection and museum practices, particularly in the following fields:
- Inclusive practices;
- Collection of objects and stories, heritage of the contemporary;
- Notion of “popular culture” to be revisited;
- Articulation between art, history and ethnography;
- Writings in exhibitions and in collections: how to transcribe documentary data (alternative cartography, artistic expressions of digital, statistical, or chronological data, exhibition of field notebooks, etc.);
- Performative devices in museums;
- Development of itinerant and extramural projects.
About the Chair’s Partner
The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem) is a national museum located in Marseille. Europe and the Mediterranean are considered from the perspective of human and social sciences and art. Emphasis is placed on circulation and exchanges on a Euro-Mediterranean scale, on changes in our societies and on sensitive issues, as well as on contemporary re-readings of ordinary or informal cultures and practices (technical cultures, doing, representations and imaginations, productions and expressions little or not institutionalized). The Mucem develops, by immersing researchers in the museum, research projects applied to the materiality of objects, to the history or enrichment of collections, to the relationship with the public, to the writing of the exhibition, to artistic creation. The mechanisms supporting this approach are of different types: CIFRE doctorates, post-doctorates in partnership with the EHESS and the SoMuM Institute of Aix-Marseille University, temporary research missions and residencies for CNRS or university staff. The Mucem also organizes, with the Camargo Foundation and Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) of Aix-Marseille University, exploratory residencies for artistic or museological research.