Musée de la Mémoire ‘PROPRIÉTÉ UNIVERSELLE’ ®

Musée de la Mémoire ‘PROPRIÉTÉ UNIVERSELLE’ ® – Catalogue inventaire d’un musée par lui-même was conceived by the artist and developed in dialogue with the graphic designer. The book, an “inventory-catalogue of a museum by itself”, chronicles the evolution of a museum as a monument to a former mining area. Without walls, the museum imbues the air with memory, reaching out to the universal. The book has all the hallmarks of a classic art catalogue: a generous presentation format, with works displayed frontally detached from their context, printed in colour on coated paper. That concept of classicism inspires and guides the design but is also radically disrupted. For instance, the book is set entirely in Courier font and introduced by an absent text, represented by abstract lines.

“As a journey into a studio’s archives, this book is a narrative. An inventory of a collection, it could be called a museum catalogue. It can also serve as a guide to the work whose history it relates here.” (Joëlle Tuerlinckx, 2024)

The jury on Musée de la Mémoire ‘PROPRIÉTÉ UNIVERSELLE’ ®:

This outstanding project is a book about a museum that does not exist or that never existed. It contains an extraordinary amount of material but still projects a strong sense of consistency and a tranquil atmosphere. Many aspects come together, including photography, collage, typography, artefacts, notes and archival documents, and it is simultaneously contemporary and timeless. It offers an alternative and intelligent way to navigate a museum at your own, leisurely pace. Moreover, it is a very bold and innovative idea to make a book serve as a kind of tactile museum.

How did the idea for this project come about?

In 2006, the Mayor of Cransac in France invited artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx to create a work of art commemorating the town’s mining history. In his words, “making a powerful gesture without it being a bronze statue of a miner”. The Musée de la Mémoire became the answer to that mission. It breathes new life into the city and fills the void. Reduced to its sole dimension of height, erected as a needle in the landscape 34.25 metres high (exactly a tenth of the 342.54 metres travelled by the miners to reach their workplace), it imbues the air with the memory of the past. The inventory-catalogue, an essential part of any museum, completes the project and expands the scope of the monument such that it becomes universal.

What makes your project so special?

The Musée de la Mémoire project is incredibly layered: the physical and digital archive, the visible and invisible, and the museographic material used for the design, both its basis and development (objects, images, films, models, drawings, studies, photographs). Without losing its dizzying infinitude, the challenge was to provide an overview via a linear narrative of 584 pages and in the form of a paper volume weighing 2.4 kg. A whole universe is revealed through cross-references, inventories and lexical references. On page after page, the reader discovers its monumental scope.

Do you have any further plans for this project?

We can interpret this question in two ways. On the one hand, with this project we have developed a method, a sculptural way of handling graphic design. How a fold becomes magnetic, how the white of the page is conceived as a wall. It is an approach based on contrasts and counterpoints. Each new project is an opportunity to make the study more in-depth. On the other hand, we discover how this invention of the catalogue “by-the-museum-itself” is rich in possibilities and open to future developments. The museum can publish (parallel publications are already in the works), organise exhibitions and invite artists in its own name. It is not only a monument but also a medium to disseminate the work.

Produced with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (Belgium), Fondation de France and Centre national des arts plastiques (France)