The Minusublimus project involves three partners: The city Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire through the Musée de la Loire (Museum of the Loire), the network of multimedia centre “Loire et Nohain” and the Junior High René Cassin. Presenting the testimony of the disappeared Loire Valley activities and a remarkable collection of modern paintings, “le Musée de la Loire” mixes different disciplines such as art, history, and ethnology… Minusubliminus is directly enrolled through an exhibition that asks the nature of a museum sculpture, for example, interrogating the presentation of heritage objects, the diffusion of knowledge or frames of reference transmiied…

Indeed, any museum offers objects presented as newsworthy, but also offers a precise and circumscribed speech about reality, whether past or present. Because reality and representations we have about it are intimately linked, and the objectivity attempt often doomed to failure. This is especially true in a museum device where the exhibited objects have a scientist interest and an aesthetic or narrative interest too. The surprising story of the parrot Ver-Vert of the Jesuit Gresset, mentioned in the museum, has been food of reflexions around the exhibition. Educated by Siters of Nevers, Ver-Vert is a “pious” parrot that would speak a refined and Christian language. Offered by religious from Nevers to religious from Nantes, the parrot is entrusted to a boatman of the Loire to be transported to Nantes. The story tells the parrot learns on the boat, the boat vocabulary and arrives safely swearing like a trooper.

Any museum is it not the vehicle of legends, traditions, myths, and ideologies? The exhibition addresses this issue of the meeting between facts and fictions, whether art, history, geography or natural science. 

In the first part, Aurélien Mole is invited to have a look on the permanent collections by the production of specific works, emphasizing content, offering an interpretation, a way of offering a particular rereading to this collection before the counting in 2012. * Aurélien Mole has many specialties (artist, art critic, photographer exhibition…) that enable him to transfer practices from a discipline to another. His work gives a combination of romanticism and pragmatism, magic and science. The staging of found objects or other artist’s works create some ambiguous readings of these artefacts, as so many stories to interpret. For the museum, this is a parallel story, and it causes an unexpected look that offers the viewer to exercise.

In the temporary room, a collective exhibition deepens the problematic in different ways.

The Atlas Group directs the notion of archives, elements often used to show a historical true. Guillaume Bijl’s work produces an effect of perturbation, blurring the usual codes of museums, presenting daily objects. So we go with him in a “future museum”. Marc Dion, on the other hand, he takes a look quite critical at evaluations we can have on certain objects (shields, trophies, stuffed animals…) often forgetting the power games they represent and can be violent however. Cristina Lucas is also interested in structures of power conveyed by the collective memory and in offsetting with the historical facts. Estefanìa Penafiel Loiaza updates in a poetic way our frames of reference to both; give us a well-informed view on certain aspects of reality, but also distort to other interpretations. Julien Tiberi also goes on the imagination side by creating scientific and artistic anachronisms. Finally, Bettina Samson underlines the inherent aesthetics to scientific practices, deliberately blurring the line between the artistic creation and the scientific creation.

Céline Poulin