Le Figaro Nantes
The snake mask Baga watches silently, enveloped in the halo of light of its alcove.
No less than five people installed, at the end of February, this slender statue from Lower Guinea, 2.24 meters high, and which now towers over the curators and managers of the Dobrée museum.
Like this establishment, the wooden sculpture slowly awakens from a long sleep.
Transformed by 25 months of work, the Nantes museum is preparing to finally reopen its doors to the public in May, after 13 years of closure.
In recent weeks, its teams have been busy installing the collections in their places, adjusting the scenography, checking the signage - and familiarizing themselves with the 2,500 objects in its permanent exhibition.
Because there are newcomers.
Always kept in obscure reserves, objects from the non-European collection of this departmental museum will finally find the light of day.
And their colonial past with them.
These exotic pieces are now being assembled on the second floor of the renovated Palais Dobrée, which they share with the museum's Mediterranean collections.
Egyptian mummies and Athenian ceramics came together to accommodate sets of Chinese paintings, Qing furniture, Wahaika pendants and clubs from New Zealand, a Jewish headdress from Algiers, and even anthropomorphic statues from West Africa and the hypnotic Baga snake mask.
The unprecedented inclusion of these objects is part of the new mission of the establishment, relabeled as a “museum of all curiosities”, rather than a history and archeology museum.
A place, in short, more open to the world and to society.
“We worked to make the public feel at home,”
said scenographer Adeline Rispal in January, referring to the order from the Loire-Atlantique department, which invested 50 million euros in the rehabilitation of the site.
The spirit of the times
However, it also happens that the presentation of the non-European collections of the Dobrée museum comes at a time when the conservation of these collections is a question for the West.
In 2017, during his speech at the University of Ouagadougou, President Emmanuel Macron recognized as legitimate the demand from certain African countries concerning the return to the black continent of heritage monopolized during the colonial period.
Submitted in November 2018, the report that he had then commissioned from Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy on the restitution of African cultural heritage notably underlined the importance of the inventory work that still remained to be done in museums, to map this heritage preserved in France.
Germany, for its part, has committed in 2021 to returning part of the treasures kept on its territory, while London and Paris are procrastinating over the fate of the hundred of thousands of objects kept at the British Museum and the Quai Branly - in addition to some symbolic restitutions.
View of the Palais Dobrée, one of the three buildings of the Nantes museum.
The non-European collections are kept on the second floor.
SC, Le Figaro
Compared to these behemoths, the non-European collections in Nantes certainly appear very modest.
Some 2,500 objects from Asia, Africa (excluding Egypt), America and Oceania are preserved by the Dobrée museum, a drop in the ocean among the 130,000 cultural assets listed in the institution's inventories.
Although enriched by some legacies and donations, this collection was essentially amassed by the shipowner Thomas Dobrée (1781-1828), supplemented by the acquisitions of his namesake son, which gave birth to the embryo of the current museum.
Involved in trafficking, the family however found its fortune elsewhere, in the spice and tea trade.
Not enough to reassure the elected officials of Nantes and the department who, according to our information, were several to question the management of the Dobrée museum the day after the publication of the Sarr-Savoy report.
Were there, in short, a few corpses in the cupboard of the Nantes establishment?
That the Dobrée museum does not keep an ostensibly problematic piece does not mean that one or more of these objects were not looted, or acquired in an unfair exchange.
Jean-Philippe Rouquès, Survie 44 association
Director of the Dobrée museum, Julie Pellegrin, confirms to Le
Figaro
that non-European objects kept in Nantes have remained the poor relations of the collections for too long.
“We have been working seriously on these objects for a good half dozen years,”
she says.
We had them studied by specialists and we realized that we had some extraordinary pieces in our possession.
Today, we work with many institutions to know them better and study them better.”
The rooms which will house these collections, which
Le Figaro
was able to visit, restore the colonial context of the time, evoking for example
"the ambivalent relationship to the African continent, between domination and study"
, as evidenced by the exhibition in Europe of objects brought back by adventurers, ethnologists and other French soldiers.
Explain, failing to restore
Is it enough ?
Jean-Philippe Rouquès doubts it.
On behalf of the departmental office of the Survie association, dedicated to the fight against Françafrique, the activist asked the museum for clarification on the precise origin of certain objects.
While some goods, such as Chinese paintings, are clearly identified as “tourist”
productions ,
others have a more obscure origin.
“That the Dobrée museum does not keep an ostensibly problematic piece does not mean that one or more of these objects were not looted, or acquired in an unfair exchange, as was often the case in a colonial context.
” he explains.
“
We can also question the lack that the disappearance of these objects can cause in the places from which they originate, as well as the conditions of their exhibition,”
adds Jean-Philippe Rouquès.
Read alsoLoire-Atlantique: a retro swimming pool from the 1950s soon to be saved by the Stéphane Bern Mission
The Dobrée museum received the activist in May 2022. He was welcomed by Gildas Salaün, head of the museum's African and Oceanian collections, as well as socialist deputy to the City of Nantes.
Asked by
Le Figaro
, the elected official did not respond.
Jean-Philippe Rouquès describes the meeting:
“We were welcomed very cordially, but, although they understood our fears, the museum officials above all assured us that no piece was linked to looting.
This closed the topic.
So we left it there, lacking the means to access the objects in question to investigate.
But this subject remains topical, and returning these collections with good grace would be a strong symbol.”
We do not know under what precise conditions these transactions were carried out.
Julie Pellegrin, director of the Dobrée museum
Julie Pellegrin sees things differently.
She recognizes that it is very difficult to trace the source of all the objects, the trail of which too often stops at merchants encountered during travels.
Most of the museum's Oceanic objects were thus acquired during trips by an English ethologist based in Nantes,
"and we do not know under what precise conditions these transactions were carried out"
, recognizes the museum director.
But it would not be a question of being overzealous, despite the
“very healthy”
commitment – according to her – of the associative and activist community on these questions.
“Not only do we not have, to our knowledge, any object of controversial provenance, which would be the result of looting or a documented conflict, but, what is more, no object is the subject of a claim »
, underlines the curator, who accommodates this ambivalence, which other French museums share.
What would happen in the event of a restitution request?
The director of the Dobrée museum is not shy.
This will depend on the file.
“We are open to discussion.
If the question of restitution were to arise, we would go all the way.
It turns out that’s not the case, but there’s still work to be done, that’s for sure.”
For now, the priority remains preparations for the reopening of the museum on May 18.
Until then, no corpses on the horizon in the establishment's cupboards.
This could be the work of the Baga snake mask.
Donated to the museum in 2011, this object from the beginning of the 20th century is said to have remarkable therapeutic powers.