“I have to stay home … I have to stay home …” : the lines pass, on about fifty duplicate copies of schoolchildren kept in Marseille, where the Mucem launched a collection around the memory of the confinement due to Covid-19.
Like this Parisian 50-year-old, more than 600 people responded to the survey launched by the Marseille museum in April, especially in France, but also in Spain and as far as South America and China: “What object embodies your confined daily life?”
Prototype of a mask disinfecting machine, home-made backgammon game, from a breadboard, diary made from newspaper clippings, works of art inspired by everyday life: in total, 171 “physical” objects were recovered by Aude Fanlo, head of the research department of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, and the entire scientific team.
“We are a space of everyday life, of the popular”, she explains to AFP, recalling that the Mucem is the heir of the Museum of popular arts and traditions of Paris, which it took over when it opened in 2013: “Our collections are also built from the field, there are not only masterpieces. We are pursuing this DNA method which is that of museums of society.”
For the moment stored in the museum’s reserves, at the Belle de Mai, this memory of confinement does not yet have the status of a collection. To acquire this label, these objects will have to go before the collections committee, then the acquisition committee. It is only then, after having taken these steps, that some of them will officially be part of the Mucem: “They will be inalienable, in an imprescriptible way, like the Mona Lisa”, smiles Aude Fanlo.
In the meantime, all this collected material is going to be “interrogates” by Simon Leroulley, Doctor of Sociology from the University of Caen, recruited for two years by Mucem under a post-doctoral contract: “The final objective, from these objects, is to produce a socio-anthropological analysis of daily life in times of confinement.”
In some prisoners, these moments of forced solitude gave birth to “imaginary friends”, like this “man with a cigar” who accompanied Cathy and Christian: the cigar is a cardboard tube, slipped under the toilet seat which acts as a of mouth, and the eyes are two rolls of toilet paper …
System of colored flags to communicate with neighbors, acts of self-punishment, like these lines of writing worthy of a schoolboy punished by his teacher, ritualization of everyday life, with calendars crossed out “like chemotherapy diaries”: “With these surveys-collections, we seek to take photographs of French society”, explains Aude Fanlo.
“Tags and grafs”, “social history of AIDS”, “wall writings in prison space”, “economy of recycling and waste”: regularly the Mucem seeks to auscultate the contemporary era. With this research around containment, a possible exposure still remains a distant horizon. We will first have to “broaden the sociology of this collection, towards popular and vulnerable categories”, insists Simon Leroulley, specialist in urban social movements.
In the northern districts, “for some we touched survival”
Launched by the museum via its various accounts on social networks, this survey-collection has so far reached a rather privileged and cultivated public. Hence the sociologist’s choice to appeal to the activists of the “McDonald’s” of Saint-Barthélémy, this former fast-food restaurant now converted into a food platform, in the poor districts of the north of Marseille.
Thanks to these “improvised experts”, Simon Leroulley wants to show how confinement is experienced differently in these neighborhoods: “There, the objects that embodied confinement were rather children’s diapers, or basic feminine hygiene products. For some, we touched on survival.”
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