The Musée du quai Branly, France's largest new museum in 30 years, opened its doors to the public a year ago. How has it been faring since, asks David Tresilian in Paris The Musée du quai Branly, France's museum of non-European traditional arts, opened in Paris almost exactly one year ago to much fanfare and not a little controversy. It was, the then French president Jacques Chirac explained, the first museum of its kind in Europe and the first to present objects previously hidden away in institutes of anthropology as art objects in their own right and under the most up- to-date conditions. Chirac's personal interest in the new museum, reviewed in Al-Ahram Weekly in August last year, was well known, and the French press soon began to refer to it as the Musée Chirac, the Chirac Museum, and a monument to the former president's decade or so in power. While the new museum received a generally enthusiastic welcome, lines stretching round the block on the site at the quai Branly near the Eiffel Tower even months after its opening, there were also some critical voices. The architectural ideas behind the new building were bizarre and patronizing; the interior of the museum was too dark; there was insufficient information on the objects displayed and no coherent story-line to help visitors make sense of them. Some of these criticisms were misplaced -- the museum contains works taken from the French capital's previous anthropological museums, the Musée de l'homme at Trocadéro and the Musée des arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie at Porte Dorée, and it would be hard to impose a common story- line on all of them. These museums contained materials from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas, many of them collected during the colonial period. The new museum's single exhibition floor is divided by region, the displays aiming to provide documentary and contextual information on the objects presented. However, other criticisms were more penetrating. Why, for example, had architect Jean Nouvel, one of France's best-known and responsible for what promises to be the magnificent new Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, chosen to present the exhibits in a "cave-like" environment? Why the emphasis on vegetation? Were these things evidence of prejudice among European museum designers, who still seemed to think in terms of "primitivism" and being close to nature when it came to displaying traditional art from outside Europe? It is true that when the museum opened it was too dark inside to see some objects clearly, or to read the labels associated with them. In a desire, perhaps, to move away from the familiar "white box" style of gallery design, the designers of the new museum had gone for something more along the lines of a "black box" one. The familiar arrangement of display cases along the walls of the gallery had also been abandoned in favour of planting them at intervals in the central space, making the visitor's experience less like a pleasant stroll from case to case and more like negotiating an obstacle course. Perhaps this was intended to provoke the idea of "exploration". Nevertheless, the new museum has been a hit with the French public and with visitors to Paris, and one year on teething problems have been rectified. On a recent visit to the museum its strong points were in evidence: ample use is made of new technologies to position ethnographic film clips near exhibits, for example, or to give information on the original use of objects and the circumstances under which they were collected. The museum's interior lighting is also better than it was, the central "river", a sort of concourse area linking the geographical areas on show, now being quite bright. The glass wall, several metres high, that marks the institution's boundary on the Seine side has been a good idea, and it makes novel signage space. The garden, intended to be one of the institution's signature features, is also doing well and has matured nicely. The "vegetation wall," part of the museum's street façade planted with hundreds of different plant varieties, has flourished. The museum café is also functioning, which it wasn't when the museum first opened. Labeling of the exhibits is better too, and, unusually for French museums, the information provided is in three languages, French, English and Spanish. There is an audioguide, also in several languages, that provides additional material on selected exhibits. Branding seems to have been a priority of the new museum, the institution apparently needing the kind of clear public identity that the old anthropological museums lacked. Nouvel's new building has provided the glamour that now seems part and parcel of any major new museum. On a smaller scale, and much more portable, the musée du quai Branly also has a line in branded knick-knacks, fridge magnets, t-shirts, badges, that sort of thing. Everything is smart and efficient, from the staff to the ticketing system, all laser scans and bar codes. There is also a heavy investment in technology throughout the building. Words and images are projected on blank walls and floors, and unidentifiable squawking, rattling and clanking goes on around exhibits, together with fragments of human voices, all presumably to add "ambiance". What happens when the computer system that runs all this goes wrong is unclear. Perhaps it never does. Overall, the seamless technological environment in which the works are displayed makes an intriguing contrast to the works themselves, all of which come from traditional or pre-modern cultures, now orphaned in their glass boxes. Wandering around the permanent exhibition on the "free itinerary" recommended by the curators, there is perhaps still a feeling that although this is one museum that has moved very far away from the "cabinet de curiosités" model of display design, a sort of random collection of disparate items, it may not have moved as far away as one is sometimes encouraged to think. One cabinet labeled "témoinages de l'art hispano-mauresque" in the Africa section, for example -- the North African Arab countries are put in the Africa section of the museum, the rest lumped in with Asia -- contains an 18th-century astrolabe from Morocco, fragments of a 9th- century minbar from Tunisia, and Moroccan "pilgrimage gourds" dating from between 12th and 14th centuries. In the next case along there is a collection of Tuareg Neolithic stones from the Algerian Sahara that date from between 5000 and 1000 BCE. These items are fascinating in themselves, but the links between them are far from obvious. Perhaps one of the most successful features of the permanent exhibition has been the multi- coloured "boxes" stuck on the museum's river façade, a striking feature of the architectural design, each of which contains small pocket collections of related items. In the museum's North Africa section, for example, there is a small collection of 18th-century Moroccan jewelry, unusual to say the least, and another of the "faience" ceramics -- decorated, glazed earthenware -- made at much the same time and in the same area. Quai Branly is hosting two temporary exhibitions at the moment, placed on a mezzanine floor above the permanent collection and displayed in filtered natural light. The first of these, Ideqqi, art de femmes berbères, displays some 140 examples of the traditional pottery made by Berber women in rural areas of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. The second, Objets blessés, la réparation en Afrique, is an exhibition of repair work carried out on damaged objects in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. These exhibitions alone are more than worth the price of the admission ticket, the second in particular almost serving as a manifesto exhibition for the museum as a whole. Ideqqi means pottery in Berber, and the works on display, though mostly dating from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, employ techniques and designs dating from pre- Roman antiquity. Following the Arab invasions of the 7th century CE, the Berber inhabitants of North Africa, subdued by the Romans only in the coastal areas, withdrew inland where they preserved a high degree of autonomy as well as the use of their mother tongue. Ideqqi is a form of pottery made only by Berber women for household use and decorated according to traditional patterns before being baked, not kiln-fired, and painted with a vegetable varnish. The shapes are instantly recognizable, as are the abstract designs employed, which connect to those traditionally used in Berber textiles and even in body painting and tattoos. This form of pottery was intensively studied by French anthropologists during the colonial period, and the musée du quai Branly has one of the world's most important collections, including water jars, plates, storage jars, and other items. According to the exhibition catalogue, this pottery, quite different from other Mediterranean forms, owes its long history to the human geography of the Maghreb, characterized by "isolated rural and mountain villages outside major circulation routes and sheltered from foreign invasion [in which] a mosaic of different tribes lived almost independently." Most of the items in the Paris show come from the Grande Kabylie area of Algeria, though Berber women's pottery extends from the Moroccan Atlas Mountains to the Sejnane region of Tunisia. Near this exhibition of Berber pottery is a collection of repaired items, masks, religious items, household objects, and so on, from various sub- Saharan African countries, notably in francophone West Africa. Different cultures have different attitudes towards repair work, from the throw-away cultures of the contemporary West, many of which nevertheless have a growing concern for conservation, to the African traditional cultures surveyed here, in which repairing a broken object is a way of enhancing its function and adding to its meaning. Repair work in these societies typically becomes "a part of the original object", there being no attempt to make the object "as good as new" or conceal the fact that it has been repaired. On the contrary, a repair is almost advertised on the surface of an object to signal that object's history. Repairing an object is intended to make an investment in it and "to restore damaged equilibrium". As Paulette Roulon-Doko observes in her intriguing investigation of "repair words" in the exhibition catalogue, "repair" is very different from "restoration", not least because whereas the former is concerned with the function of an object, the latter is concerned with its value. One of the most fascinating aspects of this small exhibition is the way it draws attention to the different values attached to repair and restoration in different cultures, connecting to the museum's institutional role as a place of conservation. Ideqqi , art de femmes berbères & Objets blessés, la réparation en Afrique. Musée du quai Branly, Paris, 19 June to 16 September 2007.
