Chassagnol, A., Marie, C.
Le musée du futur: imaginaire du musée dans la littérature contemporaine imagée, (2023) Culture et Musees, (41), pp. 119-149.
DOI: 10.4000/culturemusees.9947
Abstract
This article elaborates a poetic (in the ancient Greek sense of poesis) description of the future museum on the basis of the portrayal and fictionalization of museums in contemporary illustrated literature. Up until now, the museum in literature has mostly been studied from the perspective of novels. Illustrated literature (picture books, illustrated and graphic novels) has long been neglected despite the fact that it contains original and visionary ideas for how museums exist as institutions, but also as specific markers of space and even time. These images are not simply the fixed visual transcriptions of museums. Their appearance is the result of close collaboration which no longer merely operates between author and illustrator, but directly between museum and illustrator commissioned by them to reflect upon its perceptions, with publishing houses inviting authors and artists (Enki Bilal, Christophe Ono-dit-Biot and Adel Abdessemed) to deliver their vision of a museum by spending a night there. On the basis of a corpus of French and English language works published in the 2000s, this article presents the current trends revealed by these works and how their modelling of the museum of today in fact prefigures that of tomorrow. Illustrated literature seems to reinvent museums on a human scale, as a heterotopia (to use a term from Michel Foucault) of affect, in which it is more important to preserve and question the essence of life as opposed to the essence of the world, museums of people and relations (as Nicolas Bourriaud suggests), museums of self, at once mobile, intimate and humane. © 2023 Avignon University. All rights reserved
Author Keywords
contemporary literature; graphic novels; illustration; museums; novels; picture books
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