Main entrance, Palais de la Porte Dorée, completed 1931. Architect Albert Laprade, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; relief sculpture by Alfred Janniot, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; fence by Jean Prouvé, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, lions by Henri Navarre, all rights reserved), view in June 2008.
Much of the existing literature on the CNHI represents the views of curators and historians associated with the project, the latter, including well-known specialists on the history of immigration in France such as Gérard Noiriel and Nancy Green, in their capacity as members of the institution’s historical advisory committee during its planning stages.5 They and scholars external to the project, such as the anthropologist Anouk Cohen and the historian Caroline Ford, have rightly emphasized questions of mission and politics: the challenges faced by a museum tasked with changing prevailing social attitudes toward immigration, the political context and implications of such a project, and its relation to ongoing debates over history and memory.6 These earlier accounts together provide a baseline history of the institution, from calls for its creation from immigrant associations in the early 1990s; to an official state commitment, after a number of stalled proposals, in 2004; to a somewhat fraught opening in October 2007, with Nicolas Sarkozy, recently elected president at least in part on his reputation for toughness on immigrants, conspicuous by his absence.7 But these articles also illuminate, without fully exploring, some of the internal politics of institution-building, which are intimately connected to the broader political context but not identical to it.
The analysis I offer draws on the insights of several decades’ work in critical museum studies, which seeks to probe the ways museums use objects and strategies of display to transmit meaning, propagate knowledge, and promote certain social and cultural values. In a pioneering article published in this journal in 1988, Annie Coombes called attention to one of the fundamental dilemmas faced by museums of ethnography: their self-perception as purveyors of objective scientific information and as educational resource center versus their sensitivity to political pressures and need to provide ‘some vital and visible public function’.8 Although this dilemma has hardly been limited to ethnographic museums, Margaret Anderson and Andrew Reeves have shown that the ethnographic emphasis of Australian museology for a long time shunted history to the side, in institutional discourse as well as in the late formation of history museums on the island continent.9 More recently, Kylie Message has scrutinized the concept and discourse of ‘newness’ deployed by museums in the twenty-first century. The hallmarks of institutions vaunting their newness, Message shows, include the claim to transcend outdated disciplinary boundaries, a proclaimed transparency, the embrace of cultural diversity, and the search for alternative names – all characteristics of the CNHI.10 Such claims have prompted some skepticism from scholars and critics, who question how far innovative practices move museums away from traditional roles.11 As Nélia Dias has shown, for example, the politics of display in France have long favored the concept of cultural diversity, which privileges artistic expression and seeks to establish the equivalence of cultures, over that of difference, with its abrasive edge and implicit challenge to universalism.12 The discourse of diversity clings to universalism in a way that actually erases difference.
As far back as 1979 the literary scholar Eugenio Donato pointed to the ways museums engage in fabulation to sustain the ‘archaeological fiction’ that an assortment of fragments can constitute a coherent representation of the world.13 Recently some scholars, for example Christopher Whitehead, have, without altogether dismissing the textual quality of museum exhibits, insisted on the need to acknowledge both the peculiarity of the ‘language’ of display and the collective nature of its authorship; Message, in a different but related vein, investigates the effect of language and rhetoric on the work of museums.14 If, moreover, what we might think of as the museum’s master narrative imputes an inherent order to the objects and texts it displays, Henri Lefebvre has observed that coherent narratives – stories or histoires, in the double French sense of the word – do not inhere in particular places, but rather become attached to them as the result of contests for authority.15 If the process of the CNHI’s construction as an institution is too recent to permit full access to its archive, the texts produced by its actors, as well as its results – the permanent and temporary exhibitions of the museum – do provide a glimpse into its enabling fictions and the kinds of contestation to which their fabrication gave rise. Just as the museum is well worth a visit, its construction merits careful analysis.
Initially the project involved three different groups: immigrant associations that had supported the museum, scholars whose expertise the State sought in planning its exhibits, and museum professionals who were, along with Patrick Bouchain, the architect in charge of transforming the Palais de la Porte Dorée, entrusted with carrying those plans out. Accounts of the project’s history have emphasized the role of people from the associational milieu and of professional historians. Driss Al Yazami, who came from Génériques, an association devoted to assembling and exhibiting oral and written archives of immigrants, co-authored an influential preliminary study commissioned by the Socialist Jospin government in 2001 that served as the basis for later planning. Luc Gruson, director of the Association pour le Développement des Relations Interculturelles (ADRI), became the head of the administrative planning group, and, in 2010, the second director of the CNHI administrative body. Historians, for their part, continued to play a significant role in developing the content of the museum displays almost until its opening.16
The importance of the historians’ contribution, however, has been exaggerated by the manner in which it ended. In May 2007, shortly after the election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French presidency and his establishment of a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, eight historians associated with the advisory committee resigned in protest of what they saw as the new government’s regressive stigmatization of immigrants and implication that there was only one ‘national identity’. This well documented, oft-cited moment in the history of the CNHI reflects less a fracture among the three groups working on the project than a principled stand directed at the overarching authority of the state.17 It was a symbolic move, with no discernible effect on an installation already in progress, and thus emblematic as much of the historians’ powerlessness as of their investment in the project. Less known but far more significant in the shaping of the institution was a division between, on the one hand, associations and scholars and, on the other, curators and other museum professionals who were added to the planning team from 2004 on. A year before the opening the historian Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard referred to curators as those ‘who did not participate in the first study phase and are neither specialists on immigration matters nor, with two exceptions, trained historians. Unlike the architect … the Cité’s team, quite small (around fifty people) for considerable responsibilities, has trouble communicating. This has resulted in a lack of legibility felt by all their partners, who feel, whether it is the associations or researchers, less and less like partners.’18 Ultimately, those familiar with operating museums ended up with the decisive say.
The debates that pitted curators against scholars and association leaders played out in the classic discursive sites of museum-making, around concepts of the public, narrative, and display. One example, drawn from the realm of language, will set the stage for more detailed analysis. A key term for planners of the CNHI is patrimoine, and especially its process version, patrimonialisation. At its most basic patrimoine refers to what makes the modern bourgeoisie bourgeois: property associated with family inheritance; the Petit Robert lists as synonyms ‘fortune, inheritance, property’. In the context of cultural policy, the term is generally translated as ‘heritage’. One of the chief issues evoked by the various actors in the CNHI project was something they referred to as the ‘patrimonialisation of immigration’, which they understood as both a practical problem – finding materials that can be construed as representing the ‘heritage’ of immigration – and as a philosophical one. As a kin to museumification, heritage-making implies preserving something that is over, consigned to the past. Patrimonialisation, many feared, would prove a double-edged sword, at once essential to the institutional mission and a threat: preserving and rendering lifeless at the same time. Yet that is, both historically and practically, what museum professionals are trained to do.
The central question this essay poses may be framed as follows: why has a French museum of immigration history chosen to allot so much space and attention to objects it defines as art? How does this choice relate to the process and politics of its construction? And what larger lessons can scholars engaged with the public sphere take away from it? The stakes of this analysis extend beyond its object or the critical method used to study it. If all those involved in developing the CNHI believed strongly in its importance as a social project, with the lofty goal of altering attitudes toward immigration and immigrants in France, the historians conditioned their participation, in Nancy Green’s words, ‘on keeping politics out of the content of the museum itself’.19 Yet they arguably understood ‘politics’ too narrowly, failing to take into account the politics specific to the museum sphere in France, which have their own weight, tensions, and dynamics. We cannot understand this project – its distinct style of enunciation as well as its silences, its successes as well as its omissions – without considering, as an object lesson as much as an intellectual exercise, the complex entanglement of politics, display, and narrative within the spaces of the museum. In particular, I argue that museum professionals used the cross-disciplinary aims and rhetoric of the museum as a kind of discursive overlay that effectively transformed what could have been a genuinely new project into one of the most traditional of museum types: an art museum. Even if most of the art used to vary and enliven the museum’s installation was contemporary, the politics of display they served were highly traditional. This is the paradox the ensuing pages explore.
The Project and the Public
At least as far back as George Bataille’s ‘definition’ of the museum in 1930, critics have noted the animating role of the public in the lives of museums.20 In mocking the museum as a ‘colossal mirror in which man contemplates himself in all his aspects, finds himself literally admirable, and gives himself over to the ecstasy expressed in all the art magazines’, Bataille anticipated Pierre Bourdieu’s treatment of the museum as a primary site for the accumulation of cultural capital by educated elites, itself both based in and a precedent for empirical sociological studies of museum publics.21 In critical museum studies, the public emerges as a discursive construct – what Thomas Crow has called ‘a representation of the significant totality’ of the community the museum is addressing – that justifies the museum’s existence as a mediator between collecting practices, displays, and the world of lived experience.22 New museums often proclaim that they are seeking diverse and engaged visitors, but like all museums, they construct themselves in the image of an imagined public. This was certainly the case with the CNHI, which, in a certain sense, has cast itself as an emanation of its public, as the response to long-standing calls from historians and associations for a museum devoted to immigration.23
In its planning stage, and as part of wider consultations, the CNHI commissioned a sociological study of potential publics through questionnaires distributed at various cultural sites, from the Louvre to the Aquarium that has long occupied the basement of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, as well as to educators and members of immigrant associations; the results were published at the time of the Cité’s opening.24 Interviewed a few months before, the director of the Publics and Cultural Activities Department of the Direction des Musées de France, Françoise Wasserman, showed a clear sensitivity to the problem of attracting a diverse public to the new institution. Although the CNHI wanted to convince French citizens in general, not just immigrants, that it was presenting their ‘own history’, it of course hoped to attract an immigrant population that did not habitually visit museums. But, Wasserman observed, following French norms, surveys of potential visitors could classify them by their place of residence, but not by religion or ethnicity, and as for associations, ‘they do not formulate their expectations directly’.25
The discursive construction of the public during the planning of the CNHI, far from being consistent, also contains some hesitations and differences in emphasis. In an essay written before the center’s opening, Fanny Servole, a curator with responsibility for public outreach at the Cité, noted that the survey of prospective visitors revealed that its name was somewhat offputting, as the words ‘national’ and ‘history’ suggested ‘a daunting place’, largely educational and ‘hardly accessible to a non-specialist public’.26 The theme of immigration, moreover, while viewed as undoubtedly worthy of a museum, also struck many as offputting, even embarrassing. These negative impressions ran directly counter to the impression the planners had hoped to create. By emphasizing the pluri-disciplinary character of the institution, the name was meant to attract three different groups: ‘the usual museum public’; those in the habit of visiting the aquarium; and (imagined as a small group) those interested in the building.27 On this view, ‘expanding’ the institution’s public beyond its core audience of those with a personal or scholarly interest in the subject meant reaching back to include ‘the usual museum public’, typically people older and wealthier than the population at large, who would be drawn in by an aesthetically pleasing display.
Gérard Noiriel, a member of the historians’ advisory committee, struck a quite different note in an essay also published just prior to the center’s opening. Emphasizing the larger mission of the center, nothing less than to alter public views about immigration, Noiriel expressed deep unease about ‘an approach that seems to mix culture and politics’, fearing that an emphasis on cultural representations of immigrant groups would, as it had in the past, provide a benign cast to harsh and restrictive state policies toward immigrants. Skeptical of the potential of exhibits or even public programs to change ideas, and suspicious of the ‘memorial’ character of the institution, which he feared would harden rather than challenge common stereotypes, Noiriel proposed – in very general terms – live performance as a way of bringing in a new public.28 It was important, Noiriel wrote, for the center ‘to encourage proposals that allow the breakdown of dominant stereotypes, in such a way as to recuperate real people, in their infinite diversity … [so that] those outside the the political and cultural professional milieu, and who are directly affected by these stereotypes, can speak out directly’.
Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (Architect: Patrick Bouchain), ‘Forum’, formerly Grande Salle des Fêtes (frescoes: Pierre Ducos de la Haille, architect Albert Laprade, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris). Photograph: June 2008.
The website notice employs an implicit contrast between ‘a movement of workers’ (the most polite usage possible) and the abstract ‘public’, also referred to, perhaps in a nod to the multivalent notion of the Cité, as ‘users’ (usagers) – a term that also seems, in a different sense, perfectly applicable to the undocumented workers. Nor would it be much of a stretch to consider certain aspects of the occupation as the sort of live performance that Noiriel called for. Some of the photographs of the sit-in transmitted digitally to the CNHI show the undocumented workers playing musical instruments, singing, or telling stories. In other photographs, the protesters strike mocking poses in front of the massive 1931 relief sculpture depicting the bounties the colonies brought to France (chiefly raw materials and labor) that decorates the façade of the Palais de la Porte Dorée.31 Commenting ironically on the laboring postures of their colonial forebears, the occupiers offer the kind of critical perspective on the building and the history it embodies that many of those involved in the CNHI project had hoped for. Yet the Cité’s response to the protest, for all its ambivalence, made clear that the kind of open, untraditional center Noiriel and others had envisioned was already ceding to a more conventional institutional logic. Nor, in retrospect, was this in any way surprising.
Even in the planning report on potential publics, which criticized the emphasis on integration in immigration policy, the lead authors tended to elide individuals with complex experiences into an abstract public labeled ‘immigrants’. It is that abstract group whose memories the institution seeks to incorporate into ‘the national narrative’ (le récit national), a task the report authors believed only outside experts could perform.32 Jennifer González has suggested that ‘narrative, as a cultural form of representation, is partially to blame for’ the way museums reinforce ‘already inscribed cultural assumptions’.33 But neither this insight nor the idea that fundamental change in the politics of display might be in order seems to have occurred to the CNHI’s administrators. Notwithstanding its stated desire to break the museological mold, and its somewhat fitful attempts to gather stories as well as to tell them, the Cité understands its mission in terms of offering such stories and of its public as those interested in hearing them. That is why, however welcome, the occupiers could not be understood as part of ‘the public’. The public is construed less as an active collaborator than as the addressee of the museum’s narrative, even, or perhaps especially, if some of its members, immigrants or those descended from them, are also the characters in that story.
Narrative and Display
If the reference to a ‘national narrative’ is not always as explicit as in the conclusion to the report on the Cité’s projected publics, those responsible for the project were always conscious of the importance of the overall story the institution was seeking to tell. Green observes that the word ‘history’, which the new, museumified label of the institution has retained, replaced the terms ‘culture’ and ‘memory’ in earlier proposals.34 Noiriel, moreover, whatever his reservations about the project’s remaining ‘cultural’ dimensions – about, that is, its use of objects and representations to valorize immmigrants’ cultural achievements – clearly endorsed its historical as opposed to memorial or commemorative character; he characterizes history as ‘understanding and explaining the past’.35 The planning documents and articles by participants make clear that they willingly lent themselves to some of the prime tasks of narrative construction: fixing a chronology, including start and end points; fleshing out characters; and determining a message or moral. As might be expected, all of these tasks, with the possible exception of the last, provoked debate.
Thus, though some scholars wished to extend the chronological scope to the medieval beginnings of the French nation, to make the point that France has always been a land of migration, ultimately the organizers adopted a chronology focused on immigration in the period of the modern nation-state, from the late eighteenth century to the present. And although some argued that the characters in the story should include immigrants from France’s first overseas empire, what are now the departments of the French Antilles, political sensitivities – people from Gaudeloupe and Martinique have been full French citizens from birth for seven decades – led to an emphasis on those who arrived in France as non-citizens.36 As to the overall message or moral of the story, one of the conditions of historians’ participation in the project was the ability to reflect on racism, discrimination, hostility, and violence, on the part both of the state and of ordinary citizens.37 They wanted, in other words, to present the latest trends in scholarship, not an edulcorated, still less triumphalist, story.38 Yet the moral of the story determined by the overall exhibitionary framework, on which curators rather than historians had the last word, was nonetheless a positive one: that immigrants and their descendants form part of a shared national history, and that France is enriched by cultural diversity. In this framework the present, the infinitely receding end point of the narrative, takes on particular importance: the institution itself, a spatial presence doubling the temporal present, becomes the means of rectifying past wrongs.39 The story constructed in the museum space and received by the visitor becomes its own justification.
As Anouk Cohen observes, museums have at their disposal tools different from, and greater license than, those available to professional historians. Precisely the use of such tools as the selection of objects, theatrical scenography, and the mixing of genres allows the CNHI to present a history ‘purged of tensions and dissensions that exist at different levels’.40 In this way the Cité falls into the pattern described by the historian Joachim Baur, in which museums devoted to immigration seek to re-envision the imagined community of the nation, while at the same time ‘harmonising social conflicts’.41 But the CNHI also resembles its much larger and better resourced counterpart, the Musée du Quai Branly: the two share, in different versions, a master narrative celebrating a cultural diversity that reinvigorates French universalism.42 In both institutions, the narrative resists standard historical procedures such as chronology and contextualization, instead proclaiming an embrace of dialogue and allying itself with beautiful objects that render context superfluous, what Allan Megill identifies as the aesthesis of history, one of ‘four ways of evading history’.43 And in both institutions, though in different ways, this narrative works through the protocols of art museums, which emphasize the power of visual confrontation over text-based understanding. The objects and displays that form the centerpiece of the projects of the two museums play a role that at once displaces and compensates for the inconvenient histories, especially that of colonialism, that neither can fully confront.
The CNHI officially conceives of its mission in terms as linking social issues and preservation in a manner clearly related to objects: ‘The Cité seeks to be a major element of social and political (républicaine) cohesion in France. Beyond its purpose of conservation, it also has an important role as a producer of culture and of signs.’44 The Cité cast itself as facing two challenges, the first of which involves introducing the history of immigration into the national patrimoine (the second has to do with placing the public at the heart of its activities). According to the Cité’s website, this task of recognition requires ‘the constitution of a national museum, because in France it is national museums that preserve the treasures of the Republic in the name of the French people’.45 The insistence on the status of national museum requires ‘a symbolic effort’ including a historical and scientific approach and installation in a palais national, a term both obvious and untranslatable, because, more than simply a large government-owned structure, it connotes a building invested with the dignity of the state and assigned a role co-synchronous with the state’s representation of the national community.
Evident here is what one might call the cultural logic of state-sanctioned prestige. This logic infuses and links together three key elements of the CNHI project: a conception of the public that privileges traditional museum visitors, the choice of an architectural frame that many find inappropriate or objectionable, and a mode of narrativization that employs tools and display strategies more often found in art than in history museums. This logic of course provokes a certain ambivalence: along with the desire to elicit an aesthetic response to legitimize and even ‘ennoble’ immigration, it instills the fear of ‘patrimonialisation’ or, as Nancy Green puts it, ‘that an aestheticized representation might overwhelm the historical record itself’.46 Green’s premonition proved apt, yet the historians had few tools to counter aestheticization. For such an approach tends to win the day precisely as a logic of prestige, if only as the practical cost paid by academics and activists for state support: Blanc-Chaléard records the agreement of the Ministry of Culture to take charge of the CNHI as a hard-fought victory.47 How, then, does the narrative operate within this cultural logic?
Overview of ‘Émigrer’ section, Repères exhibition, Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI). Architect: Patrick Bouchain/Agence Construire; exhibition design: Pascal Payeur, Lydia Elhadad, and Patrick Hoarau. Exhibition curators: Hélène Lafont-Couturier, Marianne Amar, Fabrice Grognet, Laure Pitti, Isabelle Renard, and Elena Vignotto. Photograph: June 2008.
Case with objects relating to Fatima Tei (Tunisia, 1961), Haïgouhi Dengoyan (Armenia, 1923) and Durdija Vasic (Yugoslavia, 1970), Emigrer section, Repères exhibition, CNHI. Exhibition design: Pascal Payeur. Photograph: December 2011.
‘Diversité’ section, Repères exhibition, CNHI; Zineb Sedira, Mother Tongue, 2003, three-screen video, visible to right of window; © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Exhibition design: Pascal Payeur. Photograph: June 2011.
Art and Commonality
The mission of the CNHI and its core museum preceded the formation of its collections, something readily acknowledged by those associated with the project. In none of the planning documents – the 1992 report of the Association pour un musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the 2004 special issue of the journal Hommes et migrations, or the so-called Toubon report, also of 2004, on the main lines of the project – does assembling a collection of objects in the traditional sense, still less of works of art, assume any great importance.54 Those involved in developing the project were thinking much more along the lines of the collecte, in the ethnographic sense of the gathering of material and immaterial testimony, than of a collection. In a 2003 colloquium, Jacques Toubon, a former cabinet minister under Jacques Chirac who chaired the Cité’s planning committee and, after its opening, its administrative board, even went so far as to say of the Cité’s patrimonial function, ‘A collection as in traditional museums, no. But apart from that, it has often been said that a collection can consist of anything.’55 The 2004 report specified that the Cité would, at the moment of its opening, not have a collection in the strict sense, but would have a ‘collecting [collecte] policy’, with the twin goals of preserving the memory of twentieth-century immigration and of ‘provisioning its collections [using the French synonym fonds] and its exhibitions, even if a large part of the collections thus constituted will be primarily digital’.56 Even a brief essay on the constitution of the museum’s collections from 2007, the year of its opening, emphasizes that ‘the cultural heritage of migrants consists in large part of an immaterial heritage. Objects are a minority’.57 This is perhaps to underestimate the talismanic or auratic character of objects, the way they prompt memories that the museum seeks to enfold within the story it tells.
This tone of disavowal has led to some confusion among scholars external to the project, who have taken it – and articles like Lafont-Couturier’s, entitled ‘A Museum without Collections’ – at face value. Caroline Ford, for example, states that government officials ‘could not designate it a museum because of the absence of a collection’ and thus chose the name Cité.58 But as Blanc-Chaléard notes, once Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced the creation of the Cité as a state project in July 2004, it was given an acquisitions budget, and trained curators were brought in to develop a collection.59 Lafont-Couturier’s article actually describes, albeit very sketchily, the assemblage of the Cité’s founding collection, and the special issue of Hommes et migrations timed to coincide with the Cité’s opening is sub-titled ‘Une collection en devenir’ (A collection in development). The rhetorical minimizing of the collection and of objects should then be seen less as a statement of fact or policy than as a sign of continuing ambivalence about the ‘patrimonialisation’ of immigration and its possible consequences for the social and political mission of the institution. Ultimately, however, the resistance of some high-level cultural officials to the idea that immigration even had a cultural heritage that could be collected for the most part vanquished these reservations. Demonstrating that immigration belonged to the domain of culture, that it was not simply a social or political problem, became one of the objectives of the project’s advocates, and the designation of ‘museum’ for at least that part of the Cité that housed its collections – and eventually the entire institution – the prize.60
Yet even a close reading of the planning documents and debates hardly prepares one for the importance the museum’s installation has given its collections, as opposed to contextual or explanatory material, still less for the prominence of works of art. The objects accumulated in the brief three-year period between the finalization of the CNHI project and its opening range from furniture, toys, and family souvenirs to photographs, administrative and more personal documents, posters, and post cards. But they also include works of art, from a Daumier relief sculpture, The Emigrants, through a 1940s industrial scene by Boris Taslitzky and photographs by the likes of Robert Capa, as well as contemporary works commissioned or purchased for the museum. According to Isabelle Renard, the curator responsible for developing the collection, contemporary art constitutes an essential axis of the ‘dialogue between history, anthropology, and artistic creation’ central to the Cité’s mission. ‘The visual approach’, she continues, ‘desires to make visible from within the assembled documents and objects of the permanent collection a set of singular objects able – through both their form and their substance – to awaken the viewer’s sensibility and attention to the questions raised by the history of immigration in France’.61 The art objects acquired with this purpose, including paintings, photographs, and large-scale installations, do not constitute a separate section of the museum but are integrated into its permanent installation, although from December 2011 through June 2012 they were also presented as a temporary exhibition under the title J’ai deux amours.62
Barthélémy Toguo, Climbing Down, 2004, mixed media, Musée national de l’histoire de l’Immigration (MNHI). © Barthélémy Toguo/ADAGP 2016, Paris/Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Bandjoun Station, Cameroon.
Thomas Mailaender, Voitures cathédrales, 2004, color prints from a series of ten; installation view, MNHI, April 2014. Photograph by the author, used by permission of the artist.
Kader Attia, Correspondance, 2003, mixed media, detail (video portion not visible), installation view, MNHI, April 2014. Photograph by the author, used by permission of the artist, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
The information about the works in the museum’s guidebook varies, ranging from the art critical, such as commentary on Toguo’s materials, to the contextual, explaining why elderly men might still be living in housing intended for immigrant workers, but it almost always provides some biographical background on the artist, who then becomes another singular example of the collective experience of immigration. Inevitably, the master narrative flattens the complexity of some of the works; the original installation of Toguo’s Climbing Down offers a prime example. The installation occupies the heart of the corner gallery between the two wings of Répères. Before reaching it, the visitor may pause to look at Attia’s Correspondance, which includes two sets of photographs and two videos; on the wall beyond Climbing Down is Faciès inventaire, a set of fifty-four photographs by Hamid Debarrah of immigrants in a shelter in Grenoble. On the walls approaching it is another set of twelve photographs by Denis Darzacq called Bobigny Centre Ville; they depict buildings and pedestrians in the prefecture of Seine-St. Denis, the troubled department better known as ‘le 93’. Mailaender’s photographs are to the left.64
At one level, the density of the display and the multiplicity of photographic images make it difficult to see Climbing Down: literally, to the extent that the partitions on which Darzacq’s series are mounted allow distanced viewing only through cut-outs, but also in the way the installation constrains the work’s meaning. In contrast to the intense visual dialogue among the photographic series, Toguo’s work functions as the still center of this hinge space. This privileged position, while inviting contemplation, limits the possibility of movement around the work, the only way to take in the subtly rhythmic juxtaposition of bunks, bags, and textiles. An information sheet available on the museum’s website notes that when first exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art space on the other side of Paris, Climbing Down was the site of a dance performance.65 Though this is clearly not possible for casual visitors, it is telling that no video or audio is provided, and the closing off of the space precludes even an occasional scheduled performance. As the critic Jan-Erik Lundström writes in the catalogue of the Palais de Tokyo exhibition, far from being ‘exclusively aimed at narrating or questioning the post-colonial or diasporic subject’, Toguo’s works question the status of the European or Western subject and ‘also disobey the definitions of otherness’.66 The CNHI’s curators clearly understand this questioning, but their installation literally confines Climbing Down to one set of meanings, making it into a form of testimony that the artist himself typically resists. The space the work occupies then becomes a kind of excess, a momentary irritant rather than a meaningful subversion of the narrative.
Ghazel, Urgent, 1997–2007, six posters, detail, installation view in MNHI, December 2011. Photograph by the author, used by permission of the artist, © Ghazel 2016.
The museum posits the idea of dialogue – between objects, testimonies, archival documents, and works of art – as a fundamental way of ‘inviting visitors to experience these different gazes as well as curiosity about the constitutive heritages of their country’.70 The ‘mingling of gazes’ (croisement de regards) the museum seeks to encourage refers to three different protocols of collecting and display present within its walls: ethnographic, historical, and art historical. It has long been a commonplace of critical museum studies that the ‘ethnographic object’ comes into existence as the result of a certain kind of scholarly inquiry, usually fieldwork, that takes objects as representative of particular cultures, groups, practices, or ways of life.71 To be more precise, an ethnographic object testifies to the collective process of its creation, and ideally derives its authenticity from the testimony of a maker or user in its original context. This is what distinguishes it from the historical object, which equally emblematizes a group, culture, or historical situation, but the significance of which is, like that of a work of art (in disciplinary terms an object of art history) in the final analysis determined by an outside authority. As James Clifford has shown, the distinction between art and ethnographic objects is far from immutable, and museums play an important role in shifting the criteria of authenticity and, usually in subtle ways, the mode of gazing.72
Heritage installation, Diversité section, CNHI (detail). Exhibition design: Pascal Payeur. Photograph: December 2011.
The museum’s dialogue, inasmuch as it envisions an interaction of objects endowed with figurative speech, remains largely confined to the fiction of the master narrative that stages it. Three final examples illustrate this point: a permanent rotating exhibition of memorabilia from immigrants and two temporary exhibitions. The main way the Cité sought to involve its public in an ethnographic process of heritage creation was through the so-called Galerie des dons, which invites visitors to contribute an object, a document, or a memento, as well as a statement (témoignage) about it, to an ‘admittedly subjective’ display across a corridor from the permanent installation. Contrary to its name, the Galerie did not, at its beginning, imply a permanent gift, only a long-term loan; Grognet, who was in charge of this gallery, conceived of it as ‘a memory apparatus’ in which ‘objects have the floor (prennent la parole)’, through a dialogue between the donor and the museum – a literal recorded one in this case.74 Patrimonialization was intended to be here a temporary, reversible process; the gallery sought, among other things, to offer a creative response to the risks of patrimonialization and the anxieties it provokes. Since 2012, however, the museum has adopted a more literal definition of the gift, so that the objects transmitted do become a part of its permanent collection.75 For the curator now in charge of the gallery, Hélène du Mazaubrun, ‘This mode of acquisition by gift creates a new form of patrimoine and clearly takes part in the recognition of the history of immigration within the history of France.’76
Case with Lazare Ponticelli’s boots, ‘Contribuer’ section, Galerie des Dons, MNHI. Exhibition curator: Hélène du Mazaubrun. Exhibition designer: Mathilde Meignan with Costanza Matteucci (graphic design) and Laurent Beucher (lighting). Photograph: April 2014.
Installation view of exhibition J’ai deux amours, CNHI, December 2011: foreground, Shen Yuan, Trampoline 3-4, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; (L) Djamel Tatah, Untitled (four paintings), © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; (R behind trampoline) Barthélémy Toguo, Stamps and Imprints, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Exhibition curators: Hou Hanrou, Evelyne Jouanno, Isabelle Renard; exhibition designers: Pascal Rodriguez, Marion Solvit, Alain Chevalier.
Kader Attia, Dream Machine, 2008, vending machine with confected goods and mannequin, as installed in J’ai Deux Amours, CNHI, 2011. Photograph by the author, used by permission of the artist, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
One of the major contributions of art is narrative, explicit or implicit, transmitted through works mobilizing photography, painting and video. By definition, the narrative is also a story. On our subject in particuliar, contemporary works tell stories, singular or collective. They offer a subjective viewpoint and narrative that can agree with or contradict the scholarly narrative… . They facilitate the passage from story to history [l’histoire à l’Histoire].81
Adel Abdessemed, Coup de Tête (Head Butt), 2010–11, bronze, 5.4 × 2.2 × 3.4 m, as exhibited at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, for the exhibition Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, 3 October 2012 January 2013. Photograph by Marc Domage, © 2016 Adel Abdessemed/ADAGP Paris.
These limits come into play in a different way in a final example, the Center’s 2012–13 exhibition ‘Lives of Exile: Algerians in France, 1954-1962.’ Whereas Hanrou and Jouanno were given a set of works and asked to install them, the guest curators of Lives of Exile had a slightly different task: to develop a historical script that the museum would then bring to life with objects, mostly loans, in an installation of its staff’s own design. The difference between the script and the exhibition is telling. Produced as a book edited by the guest curators, two French historians of Algeria, Benjamin Stora and Linda Amiri, the script focuses on the experience of Algerian immigrants in France during the French–Algerian War. Although the term ‘Algerian’ was a complicated one in this period, the exhibition makes clear its exclusive concern with the non-European population of Algeria, French subjects rather than citizens, resident in the metropole during the war. Both the book and the exhibition seek to explore ‘the diverse realities of the lives of Algerian migrants through their social aspects – work, education, housing, leisure – as well as the French reaction to Algerian immigration, between mistrust, rejection, and solidarity with their political and trade union engagements’.83
In the book, Algériens en France 1954-1962: la guerre, l’exil, la vie, the small community of Algerian artists studying and working in France is the subject of a brief essay, one topic among many others. But works assigned the status of art – that is, works requiring textual explanation to clarify whatever historic or ethnographic evidence they are providing – could be found throughout the exhibition. Very few of them were made by Algerian artists, even if one expands the term beyond the exhibition’s scope to include those of European descent born in Algeria (the so-called pieds-noirs) such as Jean-Michel Atlan. Without question, the artworks presented, for example an ink drawing by André Masson and Jean-Jacques Lebel’s collage Front unique, enhanced the exhibition, especially since the historical events it recounts have become quite familiar in contemporary France. Yet many of the artworks, responding in some way to the war but not specifically to the situation of Algerian immigrants in France, did not resonate with the exhibition’s overall theme, and the labels preferred art historical to historical context. ‘Around an original set of themes’, the curators state, ‘the exhibition uses a rare collection of materials in which archives, photographs, sound, images and works of art come together to iluminate a history in which beauty mingles with insecurity, joy with nostalgia and violence’.84 They thus returned to a set of art museum protocols that have long gone unchallenged in France, in which aesthetic pleasure constitutes its own justification, and the contribution of visual signs and artistic practice to historical understanding needs no explanation.
The multiple narratives in ‘Lives of Exile’ could lead in productive directions, except that its aestheticizing impulses, present in the exhibition design – blond wood paneling meant to suggest immigrant shanty towns but more evocative of Ikea – as well as in the choice of works, seem more a reflex than a well-thought out project. In contrast, J’ai deux amours at least had a clear aim, evident in Renard’s reference to ‘greater public attendance’: from the Louvre to the Quai Branly, major museums in France today regard contemporary art as a way of diversifying their publics, mainly by bringing in younger visitors. Early visitor surveys show that the Cité’s visitors are on the whole younger than those who typically visit museums – 30% are between twenty-five and thirty-four, versus an average of 20%.85 Museum officials do have some concerns, however, that, in attracting more young museum-goers, it has lost its initial appeal to typical museums visitors, that is the middle-aged and the better off; overall attendance has been disappointing.86
Staff members interviewed in the summer of 2011 felt that one way of attracting the traditional public would be to offer more programming, tours, and information involving the building and its history. A new website for the Palais de la Porte Dorée, which in 2012 completed a renovation of its front garden and the ground-floor space known as the Forum, which now includes models of the building and information about its history and decorative program, does just that, and the 2013 rebranding also moves in this direction. After a renovation in early 2014, the entire first-floor balcony, overlooking the Forum and directly under the Galerie des dons, is devoted to the history of the building. The display, mostly text panels but with some artifacts such as posters, begins on the west side with the 1931 Colonial Exposition and the Musée de la France d’Outremer; the east side covers the period of the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts, including charges that it covered up the colonial past, and the creation of the MHI itself, with panels, a photograph, and artifacts related to the 2010–11 sit-in. A greater self-consciousness about the history of the building, including not simply its aesthetic significance but the larger histories it both represents and forms a part of, simply fulfills one of the promises of the original CNHI project, to better articulate the relationship between the history of immigration and France’s colonial past. The initiative was well worth taking, but whether it will substantially increase or diversify attendance remains an open question.
This is not, to be clear, a story of failure: the institution gets much right. Through its website, publications, and programs, the museum offers valuable resources for educators, students, and the interested public. The history on offer, while inevitably – like all narrative – selective, does not cover up shameful and troubling aspects of France’s past, and the potential remains for a more comprehensive and meaningful engagement with the relationship between colonialism and immigration. Read against the grain, the permanent exhibition provides an opportunity to think about the blurry boundaries between art, documentation, and history, much as the curators intended. But the museum clearly has much work ahead if it truly wishes to reimagine its public and reconceive its master narrative in a way that does not reify the difference between ‘art’ and ‘history’ but makes palpable the complexity of the relationship between them. Storehouses of useful practical knowledge involving preservation, display, and communication, museums are also bulwarks of tradition. Even a new and under-resourced institution like the Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration functions easily within the cultural logic of national prestige, which it simultaneously promotes and transmits. Art’s potential to provoke, to subvert, or simply to prompt reflection should not be underestimated, but neither should the capacity of institutional structures to constrain it.
See <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/la-cite/dernieres-nouvelles/nouvelle-campagne-de-communication>, consulted 2 December 2013. The change was announced in an email to the museum’s general list dated 11 July 2013. I retain the terms ‘CNHI’ and Center for much of this essay as reminders that they were in use during the period it covers, from the opening of the museum to the spring of 2014, just prior to the renovation of the permanent exhibition ‘Repères’, which this article does not cover.
On the controversy, see Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une Cité nationale pour l'histoire de l'immigration: Genèse, enjeux, obstacles’, Vingtième siècle, no. 92, October–December 2006, p.138; Nancy L. Green, ‘A French Ellis Island? Museums, Memory and History in France and the United States’, History Workshop Journal, no. 63, Spring 2007, pp. 244–5.
On the pluridisciplinary character of the institution, see Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une Cité nationale’, pp. 136–7.
On the creation of the CNHI museum collection, see Marie-Hélène Joly, ‘La place de la Cité nationale dans le paysage muséal français’, Hommes & migrations, no. 1267, May–June 2007, p. 69.
Many of these articles were gathered in special issues of two journals: Hommes & migrations, no. 1267 (May-June 2007), a pre-existing journal of immigration history that became the scholarly publication of the CNHI, and Museum International, vol. 59, no. 1-2, 2007, the latter in simultaneous French and English editions. Subsequent references to these special issues will be by title of the periodical alone. References to the Museum International issue will be to the English version unless otherwise stated, though it should be noted that it contains many errors of translation.
Anouk Cohen, ‘Quelles histoires pour un musée de l’Immigration à Paris!’, Ethnologie française, vol. 37, 2007, pp. 401–08; Caroline Ford, ‘Museums after Empire in Metropolitan and Overseas France’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 82, 2010, pp. 625–61.
The best short history extending through the period of the museum’s opening is Nancy L. Green, ‘The Immigration History Museum’, in Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (eds), The French Republic: History, Values, Debates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 242–51; see also Ford, ‘Museums after Empire’, pp. 648–52.
Annie E. Coombes, ‘Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, 1988, p. 66.
Margaret Anderson and Andrew Reeves, ‘Contested Identities: Museums and the Nation in Australia’, in Flora E.S. Kaplan (ed.), Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in National Identity (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), pp. 100–6.
Kylie Message, New Museums and the Making of Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006), pp. 11–14, 35–9.
See, for example, Christopher Marshall, ‘Back in the Basilica: The New Museology and the Problem of National Identity in the Museum of Sydney’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 100, 1997, pp. 7–10. Marshall criticizes aestheticization in a museum largely devoted to the history of immigration, so the example is particularly pertinent.
Nélia Dias, ‘Cultural Difference and Cultural Diversity: The Case of the Musée du Quai Branly’, in Daniel J. Sherman (ed.), Museums and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 124–54.
Eugenio Donato, ‘The Museum’s Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet’, in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 223.
Christopher Whitehead, Museums and the Construction of Disciplines: Art and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Duckworth, 2009), pp. 35–38; Message, New Museums, p. 20.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 57.
See the comments of Janine Ponty in ‘Le rôle central de l’historien’, interview with Marie Poinsot, Hommes et migrations, p.101: ‘depuis quelques mois je m’investis dans la réalisation de l’exposition permanente de la CNHI à un point tel que cela empiète sur mes travaux personnels et ma vie privée’.
See Green, ‘The Immigration History Museum’, pp. 247–48; Ford, ‘Museums and Empire’, p. 652 and n. 67; and Noiriel, in ‘Le rôle central de l’historien’, p. 100. Those resigning included Green, Noiriel, and Blanc-Chaléard.
Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une Cité nationale’, p. 139.
Green, ‘A French Ellis Island?’, p. 247.
Georges Bataille, ‘Musée’, Documents, vol. 2 (1930), p. 300. Translated excerpts from this article form the epigraph to James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), though this translation is my own.
Pierre Bourdieu with Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, trans. by Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990, French edition 1969).
See Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, ‘Introduction: Frameworks for Critical Analysis’, in Sherman and Rogoff (eds), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. xi–xii. The citation is from Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 5.
On the history of associations’ calls for an immigration museum, see Rapport de l’Association pour un Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (AMHI), Paris, le 21 avril 1992, typescript copy in CNHI Médiathèque, and Driss El Yazami, ‘Quinze années d’archéologie de la mémoire de l’immigration’, Hommes et migrations, no. 1247, January–February 2004, pp. 36–9.
‘La Cité Nationale de L’Histoire de l’Immigration: Quels publics?’, Hommes & Migrations, hors-série, October 2007.
Marie Poinsot, ‘Ouvrir le musée de la CNHI au plus large public [interview with Françoise Wasserman]’, Hommes & migrations, pp. 128–32. Wasserman’s department is now called the Département de la politique des publics at the Direction générale des patrimoines, which has incorporated the former Direction des musées de France.
Fanny Servole, ‘The Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration and its Public: images, perceptions and evolutions’, Museum International, p. 112.
Servole, ‘The Cité nationale’, p. 111.
Gérard Noiriel, ‘The historian in the Cité: how to reconcile history and memory of immigration’, Museum International, pp. 13–17.
‘Travailleurs sans papiers: Un premier accord pour la réouverture au public du Palais de la Porte Dorée’, 15 December 2010, <http://cgt.fr/Un-premier-accord-pour-la.html > [accessed 29 January 2011]. Specifically, the statement called the protesters ‘indispensable for our economy’ and urged a solution that would allow them to continue to work ‘without being harassed or expelled’.
AFP, ‘Occupée par des travailleurs sans-papiers, la Cité de l'immigration fermée à nouveau’, Libération, 28 January 2011, <http://www.liberation.fr/societe/01012316584-occupee-par-des-travailleurs-sans-papiers-la-cite-de-l-immigration-a-nouveau-fermee > [accessed 29 January 2011]. This AFP story also appeared in the on-line edition of Les échos, among other publications.
The photographs were shot by an interested private citizen and sent to the CNHI as a courtesy; I was able to consult them on a computer in the center’s library, but they are not officially part of the museum image collection.
‘Conclusion’, in Alexandra Poli, Jonna Louvrier, and Michel Wieviorka, la Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration: quels publics?, hommes & migrations, hors-série, October 2007, pp. 114–15.
Maurice Berger (ed.), Museums of Tomorrow: A Virtual Symposium, Issues in Cultural Theory 8 (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2004), p. 217.
Green, ‘A French Ellis Island?’, p. 250.
Noiriel, ‘The historian in the Cité’, p. 15.
On these choices, see Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une Cité nationale’, p. 136; Cohen, ‘Quelles histoires pour un musée’, p. 404; Ford, ‘Museums after Empire’, pp. 651–2. Green was one of those arguing against the inclusion of immigrants from the ‘old colonies’ (the Antilles): ‘A French Ellis Island?’, p. 249.
See Green, ‘A French Ellis Island’, p. 247; Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une Cité nationale’, pp. 135–36.
For recent trends in the history of immigration in France, see Joshua Cole, ‘Understanding the French Riots of 2005: What historical context for the ‘crise des banlieues’?’ Francophone Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, Autumn/Winter 2007, pp. 86–9.
See Cohen, ‘Quelles histoires’, p. 403.
Cohen, ‘Quelles histoires’, pp. 405–6; the translation of the latter quote borrows from Ford, ‘Museums after Empire’, p. 652.
Joachim Baur, ‘Imagining a Community of Immigrants: Ré-visions des notions dans les musées d’immigration des Etats-Unis, du Canada et de l’Australie’, in Laure Teulières and Sylvie Toux (eds), Migrations, mémoires, musées (Toulouse: Méridiennes, 2008), p. 16.
The comparison is pertinent not only because the Quai Branly inherited the collections of the previous occupant of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, the Musée des arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, which closed in 2002, but also because the two institutions both claim to break out of conventional museological modes, while still coming under the aegis of the former Direction des musées de France (DMF, now the Direction des patrimoines) within the Ministry of Culture. On the relationship between the Quai Branly and the MAAO and its claims to innovate, see Daniel J. Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire 1945-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 200–8.
Allan Megill with Steven Shepard and Phillip Honenberger, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 32–34.
Citation from <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/la-cite/le-projet-de-la-cite > [accessed 31 May 2011 and 27 December 2014].
All citations from <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/la-cite/le-projet-de-la-cite>, [accessed 31 May 2011 and 27 December 2014].
Green, ‘A French Ellis Island?’, p. 248. Both these ideas – of ennobling and of the dangers of patrimonialization – originate with the 2011 report co-written by El Yazami. See Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une cité nationale’, pp. 136, 139, citing Driss El Yazami and Laurent Schwartz, ‘Rapport pour la création d'un Centre national de l'histoire et des cultures de l'immigration, 2001’, typescript, 39 pp. plus appendices. The report is available in the CNHI Médiathèque (library).
Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une Cité nationale’, p.136.
For the various rubrics, see <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/guide-de-l-exposition>, [accessed 22 May 2010].
Green, ‘The Immigration History Museum’, p. 249.
‘Guide de l’Exposition’, <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/guide-de-l-exposition>, [accessed 29 May 2010].
On the glossing over of particularities, see Cohen, ‘Quelles histoires pour un musée’, pp. 404–5; Noiriel, ‘Un historien dans la Cité’, p. 15.
See Dias, ‘Cultural Difference and Cultural Diversity’, especially pp. 136, 146–8.
Hélène Lafont-Couturier, ‘The Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration: A museum without a collection’, Museum International, pp. 44–5.
In an essay that claims that art was integral to the CNHI project from the beginning, the earliest document the author can cite as evidence dates to March 2006, just nineteen months before the opening: Isabelle Renard, ‘L’art contemporain à la Cité: Les enjeux d’une collection’, in Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, La collection d’art contemporain (Paris: CNHI, 2011), p. 13.
Colloquium transcript excerpted in Jacques Toubon, Rapport au Premier ministre: Mission de préfiguration du Centre de ressources et de mémoire de l’immigration, mai 2004, Collection des rapports oficiels (Paris: Documentation Française, 2004), p.191.
Toubon, Rapport au Premier ministre, pp. 82–83.
Hélène Lafont-Couturier, ‘Les coulisses d’une collection en formation’, Hommes & migrations, p. 11.
Ford, ‘Museums after Empire’, p. 650.
Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une Cité nationale’, p. 136.
See Cohen, ‘Quelles histoires pour un musée’, p. 404; Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Une cité nationale’, p. 136.
Isabelle Renard, ‘Lorsque l’art contemporain réinterroge l’histoire’, Hommes & migrations, p. 17.
The exhibition, which ran from 14 November 2011 to 24 June 2012, had the subtitle ‘Une présentation des collections d'art contemporain de la Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration’. See <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/2011/3/j-ai-deux-amours>, [accessed 18 May 2012]. The stand-alone catalog published at the same time had a plan of the exhibition in the end papers: Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, La collection d’art contemporain.
Green, ‘The Immigration History Museum’, p. 249. For the principles of the installation, see Marie Poinsot, Lydia Elhadad, and Pascal Payeur, ‘L’immigration mise en scène’, Hommes & migrations, pp. 62–7.
Some of these works were rearranged as part of the renovation of ‘Repères’ in summer 2014, but as of summer 2016 the Toguo, Darzacq, and Attia works were all in the location described.
CNHI, ‘Barthélemy Toguo, Climbing down 2004’, PDF ‘fiche pédagogique’ available at < http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/collections/climbing-down-de-barthelemy-toguo>, [accessed 8 October 2015]. It is worth noting that this document is supplementary to the web page on the work; one retrieves it by clicking on the link ‘fiche pédagogique’.
Jan-Erik Lundström, ‘Performing the Hyphen: Theses on Barthélémy Toguo's Theatres of Translation’, in Barthélémy Toguo: The Sick Opera (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004), available at < http://www.barthelemytoguo.com/6textes/critiques/lundstrom_en.html>, [accessed 8 October 2015].
Lafont-Couturier, ‘The National Museum’, p. 43.
See, for example, the pages devoted to the artists Djamel Tatah, Kader Attia, Thomas Mailaender, and Rajak Ohanian in Cité National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Guide de l’exposition permanente (Paris: CNHI, n.d.), pp. 4–5, 108–13, 164–5.
This citation can also be found on the museum website: ‘Urgent de Ghazel’, <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/collections/urgent-de-ghazel>, [accessed 16 February 2013].
Lafont-Couturier, ‘Les coulisses d’une collection en formation’, pp. 11, 15.
See, for example, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Objects of Ethnography’, in her Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 17–78, especially pp. 17–30, 64; Julia Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects: Paris, c. 1925-35, Critical Perspectives in Art History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), especially chapter 3.
James Clifford, ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, in his The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 215–51.
See Grognet, ‘How to Reconcile the Irreconcilable: The place of ethnology in the Museum of the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration’, Museums International, pp. 48–55, in which he expresses the hope that future temporary exhibitions would make possible new forms of ethnographic collection; he strongly implies that this had not happened in the constitution of the permanent collection. Grognet, an anthropologist, left the CNHI in 2011 to work on the renovation of the Musée de l’Homme.
Poinsot, Elhadad, and Payeur, ‘L’immigration mise en scène’, 66; <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/la-galerie-des-dons>, [accessed 29 May 2011].
Hélène du Mazaubrun, ‘Introduction: De la mémoire familiale au patrimoine national’, in Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration, Guide de la Galerie des dons (Paris: MHI, 2014), p. 12.
Du Mazaubrun, ‘Introduction’, p.13.
Hou Hanrou and Évelyne Jouanno, ‘J’ai deux amours’, in CNHI, La collection d’art contemporain, p. 21.
Hanrou and Joanno, ‘J’ai deux amours’, pp. 22, 20.
From the exhibition brochure and website, <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/2011/3/j-ai-deux-amours: ‘La mobilité, telle qu’elle est envisagée par les artistes, n’est pas uniquement géographique, c’est également une façon de vivre, de créer, de se régénérer’>.
Isabelle Renard, ‘L’art contemporain à la Cité: Les enjeux d’une collection’, in La collection d’art contemporain, p.13.
Jacques Toubon, ‘Préface’, in La collection d’art contemporain, p. 10.
On the Zidane sculpture, see Scott Sayre, ‘The Art of Soccer: Sculpture in Paris Captures Notorious Incident’, New York Times, 12 October 2012. I visited the exhibition and saw the sculpture in December 2012. The same piece was removed from a public site in Qatar in 2013 after provoking an outcry: see <http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/qatar-removes-statue-of-zidanes-head-butt-after-complaints/>, consulted 1 January 2014.
Stora and Amiri, ‘Le mot des commissaires’, <http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/expositions-temporaires/vies-d-exil-1954-1962-des-algériens-en-france-pendant-la-guerre-d-algerie/le-mot-des-commissaires>, [accessed 16 February 2013].
Stora and Amiri, ‘Le mot des commissaires’.
Author interview with François Quéré, directeur des publics, and Fanny Servolle, CNHI, Paris, 15 June 2011.
See Michel Guerrin, ‘Le musée fantôme’, Le Monde, 20 March 2010.
