Dans le chambre des merveilles

One of the inaugural exhibitions at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, Dans le chambre des merveilles takes visitors into the world of the ‘cabinet of curisoities’, exploring exactly what it means to be a collector. In this context, the cabinet of curiosities becomes a kind of manifesto of the Museum's defining characteristics, as a place where the boundaries between different fields of knowledge disappear, a place where one comes to learn but also to question and marvel. In this ‘chamber of marvels’, 21st-century visitors can steep themselves in the atmosphere and spirit of a time when men roamed the world to collect and share their thirst for knowledge with their contemporaries. This exhibition thus presents not a recreation of an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities but a contemporary reinterpretation, an invitation to dream as one discovers a selection of the museum’s treasures.

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Opening of the Musée des Confluences, Lyon

The Musée des Confluences in Lyon opened on December 20, 2014. The architecture of the building is radical—hovering somewhere between crystalline and cloudlike—and it will be home to holdings of more than two million objects representing fields as varied as paleontology, mineralogy, zoology, entomology, anthropology, Egyptology, and prehistory. The core of its current collection is that of the former Musée d’Histoire Naturelle augmented with donations of famous collector Émile Guimet, as well as with objects collected by missionaries and from the holdings of the Musée Colonial. It was further enriched over the years by the new institution’s active acquisitions policy. The permanent collection will present more than 3,000 works shown in four thematic sections: Origins: The Stories of the World; Species: The Fabric of Life; Societies: The Theater of Mankind; and Eternities: Visions of the Great Beyond. Two inaugural exhibitions will feature most of the Émile Guimet pieces in Les Trésors de Guimet (The Guimet Treasures) and objects derived from curiosity cabinets in Dans la Chambre des Merveilles (In the Chamber of Marvels), both on view from the museum’s opening until July 2015. An abundance of cultural events—lectures, concerts, and a variety of academic programs— are also planned.

Visit the museum's official website.