Our exhibitions

This collective photographic exhibition aims to provide an innovative yet accessible reflection on the different ways in which photography is used in Mongolia. It brings together several Mongolian and French photographers, both amateur and professional, and is divided into several thematic sections, each of which aims to question the uses of photography in particular contexts: shamanic rituals, the relationship to death and the dead, the health crisis (Covid-19), image walls before and after social networks, the relationship to "home" of nomadic herders, and finally what is important to show in order to understand a people. Texts in French and Mongolian accompany the various thematic sections.

This exhibition is produced as part of the national program "Mondes nouveaux" of the French Ministry of Culture, which supports and accompanies the creation of artistic projects.

The exhibition is organized by Veronica Gruca, doctoral student in anthropology (EPHE, CEFRES), with the participation of Tseveen Bat-Erdene (amateur photographer, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) Suniko Bazargarid (professional photographer, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), Grégory Delaplace (director of studies at EPHE), Davaanyam Delgerjargal (professional photographer, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), Batkhand Lkhamsuren (shaman, Bayan-Uul, Dornod, Mongolia), Charlotte Marchina (lecturer in Mongolian language and civilizations at Inalco), Tserendejid Munkhdorj (herder and farmer, Bayan-Uul, Dornod, Mongolia), Battur Soyollkham (amateur photographer, Ulaanbaatar and Bayan-Uul, Mongolia) and Nomindari Shagdarsuren (translator and lecturer in language and civilization at Inalco).

The exhibition presents the slavery of the Roma in the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia from 1370 to 1856, before the constitution of modern Romania. It is based on various historical documents: stories, maps, paintings, photos. The panels evoke the reality of enslavement, the view of European travelers, resistance, the reasons for and modalities of the abolition of slavery, and questions of remembrance and reparation. Beyond recounting this dramatic history, the aim is to show the consequences for the reality of the Roma in present-day Romania. The exhibition also serves as a reminder that one of the longest slaveries in human history, largely ignored even by historians, took place in Europe.

This exhibition echoes International Roma Day on April 7, 2023, during which several events will be organized in the auditorium of the Pôle des langues et civilisations.

Contacts: aurore.tirard@inalco.fr (organizer) and petcutz@yahoo.com (author)

Exhibition of prints from the Archives of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and the Bibliothèque Universitaire de Langues et Civilisations (BULAC)

The exhibition is organized by Lia Wei (Inalco/IFRAE) and Michela Bussotti (EFEO/UMR CCJ), with the participation of Soline Suchet (BULAC) and Dat-Wei Lau (EFEO), as well as a team of bachelor, master and doctoral students from Inalco and EPHE: Francesca Berdin, Eric Bouteiller, Marie Blondin-Dessemme, Killian Cahier, Zack Chasseriaud, Ema Demptos, Anna Le Menach, Killian Miramende, Bastien Roth, Paula Sumera, Yin Tianjie, Yuan Ye.

Chinese stamping is a technique for reproducing engraved texts and images, usually on stone, and more rarely bas-reliefs and objects, in ink on paper.
If prints are known as research supports for the historian or philologist, and as sources of models for the calligrapher, this exhibition studies them from another less explored angle, that of visual and material culture.
The stamp has a value autonomous from the stamped object: it is a work in ink above all, and a collector's item in its own right.

Chinese prints are rarely exhibited in Europe: this is the first attempt to devote an entire exhibition to them, bringing together some forty prints from the EFEO Archives, including eleven original documents, and a dozen prints discovered at the BULAC as part of this project.

The exhibition is organized into thematic sections, which begin by introducing the "classical" function of the prints through a few emblematic pieces, and then move on to take a closer look at object prints, figurative representations, and landscapes.

The exhibition has an important didactic dimension, as the notices accompanying the prints were written in collaboration between the organizers and the students, most of whom were able to work directly on the original documents during the year 2022.

The exhibition compares photographs of these rituals in 1993 and 2017, illustrating their remarkable continuity.

The Udmurt village of Varkled-Bodja is known for having preserved a very large number of otherwise extinct traditions. It's located in Tatarstan and surrounded by Muslim Tatars, which has protected them from both Christian influences and Soviet intrusions. One of the most striking traditions is the initiation of boys and girls the week before Easter. During this ritual, both boys and girls go round the village houses collecting foodstuffs, with which they prepare a porridge. When the porridge is ready, the villagers join them to pray and eat it. At the end of this ceremony, the initiates are considered adult members of the community, with the right to marry and engage in ritual activities.

Contacts: eva.toulouze@inalco.fr; evenementiel@inalco.fr

After accompanying an international conference on the Condorcet campus in June 2022, the "Chemins himalayens" exhibition is on show from October 4 to 19, 2022 in the Inalco auditorium gallery at 65 rue de Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris.

This exhibition is in connection with the screening cycle "L'actualité de l'Asie du Sud et de l'Himalaya en images et en débats" organized by Inalco's South Asia and Himalaya department.

Despite the height of its peaks, the tumultuous flow of its rivers, or its extreme climates, the Himalayas have never been an impassable barrier or an obstacle to circulation. The aim of this exhibition is to illustrate the evolution of modes of transport, the solutions found by local populations to cope with the difficulties of the environment, and the various forms of mobility that the Himalayas are the scene of. In addition to material and technological aspects, there is a diversity of cultural practices, imaginary worlds and the persistence of the presence of the divine world in these circulations.

These photographs - and the accompanying texts - highlight the importance of mobility and traffic regimes, of trails, roads or paths in the social life of communities in various historical and political contexts. The exhibition offers a diversity of perspectives on cultures and identities more or less rooted in particular landscapes, and suggests how circulations can be socially transformative.

Contact: Ornella Puschiasis - ornella.puschiasis@inalco.fr

After the First World War, Dutch photographer Frank Scholten went to Palestine and stayed for 2 years, with the aim of producing an 'Illustrated Bible'. However, traveling to many places and adopting a documentary approach, with a particular focus on religious groups and ethnography, he offers us a rare glimpse of scenes of everyday modernity from the Palestine of the early 1920s, on the eve of the British Mandate.

His camera lens captures the complex mosaic of Eastern Mediterranean communities grappling with competing nationalisms, as well as, for Eastern Christian communities, the interactions between Orthodox Arab communities, Greeks living in Palestine and Greeks from Greece prior to population exchanges.

Although not politically homogeneous, Palestine's Orthodox Christian Arab community actively engaged alongside Muslim Arabs in the nascent Arab nationalist movement. This alliance gave rise to a series of interesting debates, such as those surrounding the reform movements to Arabize the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. It was accompanied by rapid cultural changes: secularization, a significant increase in publishing houses (often owned and run by Christians), participation in historically Muslim festivals such as Nabi Musa, a decisive role for the Orthodox community in the creation of Arab nationalist newspapers and significant Orthodox representation in the cultural sector in particular (literature production and in the visual arts).

Exhibition organized to echo the XIII Syriacum Symposium and the XI Congress of Arab Christian Studies (July 4-8, 2022).

Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri
CrossRoads project, The Dutch Research Council

In Western Mongolia, in the Altai mountain range, more than 1,000 km from the capital Ulan Bator, live around 100,000 Kazakhs. This ethnic (Kazakh), cultural (Muslim) and linguistic (Kazakh-speaking) minority leads a lifestyle very similar to that of the Mongols, who are Buddhists and speak Mongolian: these nomads breed horses, camels, cattle, sheep and goats, and travel with their herds, families and yurts several times a year. Evolving in the high mountains, they practice a vertical nomadism characterized on the one hand by a wide altitudinal amplitude between the hot and cold seasons, and on the other by very high mobility, which we have been able to highlight in recent years thanks to methodological innovations combining classical anthropological survey and the use of GPS collars.

The photos presented in this exhibition by Charlotte Marchina were taken as part of a multidisciplinary research project to study past and present pastoral mobility among Kazakh herders in the Mongolian Altai. She visited these herders four times over three years, between 2015 and 2018, to document their practices. This research was co-funded by and conducted in collaboration with the Mission Archéologique Française dans l'Altaï, CNRS, MNHN, LabEx BCDiv and Inalco.

To celebrate their 10th anniversary at the Pôle des langues et civilisations, BULAC and Inalco opened the festivities with the exhibition "Écritures japonaises: concevoir des caractères typographiques" and the eponymous study days, with a theme never before seen in France, exploring Japanese writing.

Exhibition curator: André Baldinger
Study day scientific curators: André Baldinger and Émilie Rigaud

Language and writing are among the most distinctive elements of every culture. Their transformations, developments and adaptations tell the story of our origins and our historical heritage. Each alphabet has its own system and formal repertoire. Japanese incorporates no less than four distinctive scripts: kanji, hiragana, katakana and Latin. It is written vertically, from right to left, or horizontally, from left to right.

With kanji coming from China, Japanese integrates into its system signs from the oldest script, 4,000 years old, still in use and constantly expanding. Every year, new kanji are created.
Katakana are used for words, names and expressions outside Japanese culture. Gradually, Latin is also being added for words foreign to Japanese. As for hiragana, it is used in particular for verbs, adjectives and proper nouns.
The whole makes up an exceptionally tolerant writing system, and one of the most enigmatic.

Via André Baldinger's BLine Japanese-Latin project, the exhibition penetrates the universe of these two scripts, their formal repertoires and their respective histories. It bears witness to a working process and the challenge of designing a set of Japanese-Latin characters for a horizontal, bilingual composition. This artistic project was supported by the CNAP and a research residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto (JP).

Parallel to the world of typefaces and signs, visitors are offered a rich selection of Japanese posters from 1960 to the present day - a period of abundant creativity, as in the invention of typefaces.

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Imaginary Letters to Vasily Grossman: Post-World War II Repatriation to Soviet Armenia
By Hazel Antaramian Hofman

As part of the Festival Transcaucases 20/21

Hazel Antaramian Hofman lives and works in Fresno, California. She is a painter, multimedia artist, teacher and doctoral student. Much of her work is based on her personal history. "I was born in 1960, in Yerevan, Armenia. Yet I spoke little Armenian, and what little I did speak was Western Armenian. As a child, I always wondered why I came from such an exotic place, when my father was from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and my mother from Lyon, France. It was only when I put family stories together that I understood: I was the product of two children from two Armenian diasporas who, after the Second World War, had followed their parents and their sense of duty to a dream of a motherland ("hayrenik"), abandoning their cultural and ideological bearings for another world. "

Imaginary Letters to Vasily Grossman: Post-World War II Repatriation to Soviet Armenia is a continuation of Stream of Light, a project at the crossroads of ethnographic enterprise and art exhibition drawing on the images Hazel Antaramian Hofman collected from the Armenian "repatriates" she interviewed. Over a period of five years, the artist and researcher met more than 30 "repatriates" who agreed to share their memories, personal objects and numerous photographs with her, some of which are reproduced for the exhibition. Most of the work presented in this new exhibition reflects the stories that Hazel Antaramian Hofman collected from these Armenians who left diasporic homes such as France, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Greece, Palestine and the USA, to "return" to a simulacrum of a homeland, Soviet Armenia, which they didn't know. These testimonies can also be read in the artist-researcher's imaginary letters to the Soviet author Vassili Grossman (1905-1964), who described his "impressions" of Armenia in La Paix Soit Avec Vous. Notes de Voyage en Arménie, following his stay in Armenia in 1961.

Adapted and translated by A. Der Sarkissian.

Transcaucases Festival 20/21

The Transcaucases Festival returns for its second edition at Inalco, with a series of cultural and scientific events dedicated to the Caucasus, as lived, perceived, studied, fantasized, told by artists, researchers, travelers and field actors. The Transcaucases Festival aspires to disciplinary openness across several fields of artistic and cultural creation, and to the decompartmentalization of the region's cultures. Through this varied programming, the 2020 edition of the Festival Transcaucases enables exchanges by exploring different fields of artistic and scientific creation.

Contact: evenementiel@inalco.fr

Photographic exhibition by Maureen Ragoucy

They were children, young girls or adults, students or working, frivolous or wise, today women tell us memories linked to their daily lives during the Second World War. Exile, resistance, escape from the ghetto, imprisonment, deportation, the loss of loved ones, but also insouciance and lightness despite horror, vulnerability and suffering, their war was above all about survival.
By not giving in to fear or submission, their lives went from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Their faith in the future motivates their actions. This documentary proposal is articulated between singular accounts and collective history to transmit to us the war in the feminine, between illusions and realities in France, Hungary, Poland, the United States, Russia and Japan.

Organized on the occasion of the Assises de l'Anthropologie Française des Mondes Chinois (June 16-18, 2021)

Over ritual scenes as well as moments of daily life, photographs are a reminder that in ethnology, they are often much more than mere illustrations: they participate in the restitution of data and accompany researchers' contributions by suggesting the living aspect of the terrain that words often fail to depict.

Contacts:
Adeline Herrou: adeline.herrou@cnrs.fr
Guo Jingheng: gjhcroissant@gmail.com
evenementiel@inalco.fr

Photographic exhibition by Pauline Fournier

"Una chiamata" presents a series of portraits of foreign language students created by photographer Pauline Fournier during the 2019-2020 year.

The question at the heart of the project is to what extent learning a foreign language changes us, transforms us, reveals us to ourselves.

From the intimate accounts gathered from the models during preliminary interviews we know nothing; the approach is not documentary. Pauline Fournier seeks through her photographs to suggest a movement, a passage from intimacy to otherness and the transformations that necessarily take place in us, beings in language.

The portraits are taken in the heart of the Inalco in details of the architect's building chosen to represent the interior landscapes of each model met during the course of the project. Una chiamata, the title of the introductory text to the eponymous exhibition, evokes one of her first striking experiences of otherness: foreign language.

Pauline Fournier
After earning several master's degrees in the field of languages (master's in Italian, DEA in linguistics and master's in FLE) she chose to devote herself to Slovenian language and literature, which she has been teaching at Inalco for the past ten years. It is here that she has also developed her work in the field of literary translation with other researchers at the Institute (research group and master's degree in literary translation) in the continuity of Henri Meschonnic's theoretical proposals.
More recently she has taken an interest in photography, where her creative work explores our intimate relationship with the world.

Photographic exhibition by Dominique Samson Normand de Chambourg

As part of "2019, International Year of Indigenous Languages", decreed by the UN, this exhibition is dedicated to the first three indigenous peoples across the Urals, whose cultures are studied at Inalco.

The Nenets(44,640 at the last census in 2010) are reindeer herders who nomadize with their herds in the Arctic tundras. Through the seasons, they simply follow the nedarma, the invisible road that unites past, present and future generations with the tundra and the reindeer: Here, the Nenets are born, grow up, live, love, work and die, watched over from the seven superimposed celestial strata by the gods who busy themselves with the proper ordering of the "Upper World" and the "Middle World", and from the seventh permafrost layer of the "Lower World" by Nga, the god of death, whose tchoum stands at the edge of the underground Nioul-Iam river. And on their equal forces depends the balance of the universe, upset by interactions with the Russian world and the stakes of the Arctic.

The Khanty (30,943) traditionally inhabit the forests on the eastern bank of the Ob, their sacred river, and its tributaries. Semi-nomadic hunter-fishermen, but also reindeer herders in the north and east, they move from one seasonal village to another. Their traditional way of life in a sensitive landscape where everything is alive and sacred, because each land is nothing other than a living incarnation of some goddess or other, is threatened by industrial exploitation, particularly of oil, gas and timber. The Bear, in the course of Christianization, has become a Christ-like figure

The Mansi (12,269) who live on the western bank of the Ob are close relatives of the Khanty in lifestyle and language, but the influx of settlers since the xvii^th century and extractivism since the 1950s-1960s have limited the living culture to a few mere islets; According to official figures, Mansi speakers number 938, or 7.6% of the community.

For the most part, these photos were taken during fieldwork between 1996 and 2018. The author would like to thank the Nénètses, Khanty and Mansi, as well as Inalco, for their continued support of all the projects he has been able to undertake.

Brief bibliography of the author:

• "Conversations around Paradise. Récits de vie nénètses du xxi^e siècle", La Sibérie comme paradis, Dominique SAMSON NORMAND de CHAMBOURG & Dany SAVELLI (eds.), Centre d'Études mongoles et sibériennes - École Pratique des Hautes Études, coll. " Nord Asie ", 2019, pp. 295-347.
• "We Are Not Dead Souls": The Good Petroleum Fairies and the Spiritsof the Taiga in Subarctic Siberia, Sibirica, Marlène Laruelle (ed.), vol 18, no 3, New York - Oxford, Berghahn Journals, 2019, pp. 109-150.
• "Entre sacralité, mobilité et adaptabilité, les Nénètses des toundras", in Francis Latreille, Les derniers peuples des glaces, Paris, Gallimard, 2019, p. 220.
• "Un troisième ciel sans impôts, sans maladie et sans Russes". Des vices chrétiens et des vertus chamanistes dans l'Arctique sibérien (xxi^e-xx^e siècle)", La vertu des païens, Sylvie Taussig (dir.), Paris, Kimé, 2019, p. 637-689.

As part of the International Year of Indigenous Languages declared by UNESCO, Inalco's Languages and Cultures of the Americas section is offering two exhibitions.

- Cap au Grand Nord (Annick Cojean, 1999)

All the photos in this exhibition were taken by Annick Cojean, a leading journalist with Le Monde. In 1995, she was awarded the Prix Mumm, and in 1996, the Albert-London Prize crowned her investigation into the Memories of the Shoah.
Annick Cojean made a major trip to Nunavut in July 1998. As a result, she brought back major articles for Le Monde, black-and-white and color photos, as well as memories of strong landscapes and new friendships.

These photos by Annick Cojean are being re-exhibited this year at Inalco to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the creation of Nunavut, an autonomous territory of the Canadian confederation, populated mainly by Inuit.

- Indian Time (Elena Perlino, 2017)

Elena Perlino has made several visits to Innu and Naskapi communities on the border of Quebec and Labrador, between Natashquan, Mani-Utenam, Matimékush-Lac-John, Kawawachikamach and Sheshatshiu. "The photographs combine the contemporaneity of a snapshot with the precision of a composed image, exploring the idea of identity and territory. Perlino deals with ritual, tradition and everyday life. Attentive and demanding, his eye gives rise to constructed tableaux and reconstructed moments beyond a documentary vision." (Claire Moeder for Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie)

Perlino is an Italian artist based in Paris. Her recent work has focused on migration, human trafficking and gender issues, placing photography at the heart of crucial social and political issues. She has presented several exhibitions in Asia, Europe and North America and has been supported by the Magnum Foundation as well as the Open Society Foundations and CNAP. Perlino has published the books: Pipeline (2014), about the Nigerian slave trade in Italy, Maktoub (2017) about Islam in Italy and Paris Goutte d'Or (2018).

Photographic exhibition by Jean-Louis Porte

Built in 1913, the Yoshida dormitories at Kyôto University have recently come under the spotlight in Japan: they are the subject of plans to close them down, prompting all kinds of reactions: political, academic, ideological, civil...
For good reason, these dormitories are the oldest in Japan, still housing around a hundred students and various cultural and artistic activities in Kyôto. Their antiquity has attracted the attention of architects and historians, who see them as outstanding study materials. The value of the dormitories is further enhanced by the discovery in 2012 of the year of construction of the kitchen, a highly symbolic place as it welcomes outsiders; it is said to date from 1897, making it the oldest building at Kyôto University.

In addition to these intrinsic historical values, the dormitories attract social science studies due to their complex organization, subject to the decision of the collective. Indeed, this space is self-managed by the students (jichiryô), who remain sovereign in the organization of day-to-day life, including income and expenditure; the admission and exclusion of dorm members; and, in fine, the future of these places. This autonomy is both the guarantee of students' independence but also the source of tensions with the city and the university, which wish to intervene in this place for security reasons (a reason disputed by the students).

These student lives, both original and collective, divided between autonomy and subordination, carry values that are intended to be eternal despite their ephemeral status. Thanks to this exhibition by Jea- Louis Porte, they are given to us to see in all their complexity.

"Yoshida is one of the three campuses of Kyôto University, the country's second-largest university. The oldest dormitories on this campus, built in 1913, still house male and female students. The three long, single-storey wooden buildings are linked by a corridor leading to a common entrance. The meticulous, magnificent constructions, a rare example of wooden administrative buildings still in use, have withstood natural calamities, avoided fires and bear witness to a past and architectural know-how no longer found in Japan outside of temples and historic sites.

Yoshida's dormitories are self-managed by the students, a self-management that extends to the common areas: the hall that encompasses a rest and performance room, a vast kitchen known as shokudô, a place for musicians in daily rehearsals, and the green spaces between the buildings, called "the jungle", where chickens run around.
The rooms are built identically: five tatami mats on the floor, two and a half meters high, one window to the outside, one to the corridor, one closet, one entrance.
When my eldest son, who is on civic service in Kyôto, took me on a tour of the dormitories, three things caught my eye: the beauty of the place, the timeless atmosphere that emanates from it, and the incredible diversity of interior fittings created by the students in their individual rooms. It was at this point that I considered returning to take their portraits on a future trip.

However, a few months later it was no longer possible to enter Yoshida's dormitories without an invitation or the agreement of the student collective that manages them. The atmosphere had changed, the dormitories had been declared insalubrious by the administration and promised to be demolished, and students had to leave their rooms.
Half of them had left, while the others were contesting the decision, which they claimed had no real purpose other than to put an end to student self-management of the site and the community life that flowed from it, as evidenced by the announced destruction of a recent extension to the dormitories, built in the 2010s.

It was against this backdrop that I exhibited my photographic project to the collective. The latter accepted it on condition that, for the time being, the portraits would not be exhibited in Kyôto, where future employers, via the exhibition or via the press, might discover faces and identities that they would then red-list.
The current residents defend the survival of the place because it's a historic building, because the rents are very low, 30 euros a month, because the collective life they share between the dormitories, the kitchen, the music room and the rest and performance space is an affirmation of solidarity and sharing that results from the place's long history of student self-management. It's all this that they want to preserve, at least during their student life."
Jean-Louis Porte

"[...] Let's just say that while Japan is not a civilization of open conflict, it is not, contrary to popular belief and despite its apparent social homogeneity and consensus, a monolithic society. Since Meiji, the ruling elite's stranglehold on national memory has tended to minimize, if not obscure, protest, rebellion and revolt, reducing them to a kind of "social invisibility"; in short, to "accidents" in history, i.e. facts whose significant value is deliberately concealed. In fact, a conflictual reading of Japanese history reveals a particularly rich phylum of protest. Symptomatically, the rebel, the outlaw, the terrorist, the wanderer, the fallen, the deviant and the nihilist are all major figures in the Japanese social imagination. Their saga is part of a "tradition of refusal". Another memory of Japanese modernity."
Philippe Pons, D'Edo à Tokyo : mémoires et modernités, 1988.

As part of the "La voix des Femmes Autochtones" project, portraits of remarkable indigenous women, from New Caledonia to Quebec, via Norway, will be exhibited in the Inalco gallery. The photographers who took these pictures all come from the countries or regions where they originated.

This exhibition is presented in three themes:

The presentation of the project "La voix des Femmes Autochtones"

The ambition of the project "La voix des femmes autochtones" is to spread the word of indigenous women around the world, women who are often discriminated against and victims of violence.
Anne Pastor, a journalist at Radio France, is at the origin of the project. Through numerous reports, she has helped identify women who, each in their own field, invite us to rethink a more sustainable, social, human and original mode of development.
This project, supported by the En terre indigène association, is taking place in a context favorable to its visibility: the UN has declared 2019 as the year of indigenous peoples, and UNESCO as the year of indigenous languages.

The voice of emancipation

This theme is made up of five portraits of emblematic women fighting discrimination, sexism and violence against women. Militant, lawyer, writer, these women are committed to a feminist cause to improve the status of women in their country or region. Through these shots, the photographers wanted to highlight the actions of these women as models of resistance and emancipation.

The voice of the arts

The transmission of knowledge and culture as a weapon of resistance and emancipation for indigenous women is the theme reflected in these five other portraits of women artists and artisans. These women use oral tradition as a means of transmitting knowledge and culture, inviting themselves before the stage to defend their rights and their origins.

Balthazar: Prince Noir de Timor et de Solor en Chine, en Amérique et en Europe au XVIIIe siècle

By Frédéric Durand, Professor, Université Toulouse II - Jean Jaurès
Translated into Indonesian by Nathalie Saraswati Wirja, Inalco graduate

A native of the Sunda Islands (Indonesia and East Timor), Balthazar was born around 1737 and presented himself as the son of the King of Timor. Abandoned in France by a Portuguese priest at the age of thirteen, he lived in exile for over forty years, traveling in Europe and America.
A strangely forgotten figure in history, he came into contact with many leading figures of the time, from kings Louis XV and Louis XVI to Voltaire, via the French alchemist and encyclopedist communities.

The exhibition's twenty-four panels chronologically reproduce the important stages in the life of the Prince of Timor and Solor.

Based on the book Itinéraires Asiatiques, by Jean Christophe Victor
An exhibition proposed by Arte

For the past fifteen years, Asia has conveyed the image of a continent in full economic boom, fueling representations of a region where the future of the world is at stake. The exhibition shows how demographic growth, economic development and accelerated urbanization, as well as widening social inequalities, poverty, increased pressure on natural resources and rising greenhouse gas emissions, are transforming the continent and leaving their mark on the rest of the world. However, the tilting of the world towards Asia is not without shaking up Asian societies in return. Marked by traditional social practices that are still very present, traversed by currents of modernity that the multiplication of exchanges only reinforces, confronted by the acceleration of technological mutations underway, each society, from India to Japan, from China to Bangladesh, with its constraints and resources, is trying to make its way in globalization and build a future for itself.

In 2015, over 500,000 people entered the European space by reaching the beaches of Lesvos aboard makeshift boats. Because this Greek island is only a few kilometers from the Turkish coast, it has become a sadly unavoidable stopover on the long journey undertaken by those fleeing the violence of war, in Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq, and hoping to find refuge in Europe.

Only a few months ago, Lesvos was renowned above all for the beauty of its landscapes and villages, the quality of its olives and the richness of its archaeological and cultural heritage. Today, it is unfortunately more associated in people's minds with images of refugee camps and shipwreck victims.

In a country already stricken and traumatized by an economic and social crisis that never ceases to worsen, how can an island with fewer than 90,000 inhabitants manage such an influx of humanity to be rescued? In October 2015 alone, a record 135,000 arrivals were recorded by the authorities.

The images, few and far between in France, arriving from Lesvos and highlighting the conditions in which the refugees are "welcomed", provoke astonishment. All over Europe, many volunteers set out to do their bit to alleviate the suffering of these "Others". Little by little, as the weeks went by, individual and collective initiatives, Greek and foreign, filled the void left by institutions overwhelmed by events, unable or unwilling to set up reception structures commensurate with the phenomenon.

Spending a few weeks on site is an experience that shakes you to the core.
Back to basics. You have to feed, you have to clothe, you have to protect from the sun and the rain.
But that's ultimately the easiest.
Then come the questions that tear you apart.
These families have left behind absolutely everything they owned and much of who they were.
Incredible courage, incredible dignity, incredible dynamism of these men, women and children deprived of childhood.

A former student of Inalco, Clara Villain obtained a degree in modern Greek in 2015.
This summer, on the island of Lesvos, she spent a month and a half in the company of local volunteers and refugees, in the camps. Coming from a family of artists, she naturally chose to bear witness to what she saw and experienced through writing and photography.

"In Greek mythology, the Moires are the deities of destiny. They're the ones I've chosen to name my work around the Mediterranean. These three sisters spinning, winding and cutting the thread embody origins for me. I was born in Algeria, a country I've never lived in. This is probably the source of my attraction to the Mediterranean. The sea becomes the symbol of a country, of the countries that surround it. It influences the climate. It creates light. It makes these countries the object of covetousness that breaks with the gentleness of the weather. Something awakens in me when I'm near the Mediterranean Sea. I feel the power of light, of these contrasts. I feel plants and minerals scorched by the sun. But I also feel melancholy, something that belongs to both the world of the living and the world of the dead. The monotypes presented here highlight the characteristic light of full sun. The contrasts are sharp, the shapes cutting. Paradoxically, black plays an important role in rendering the light, just as a landscape becomes black in the glare of the sun.
The monotype technique, which is a printing technique, was not chosen by chance. It came to me because of the impression it leaves. Indeed, it reflects my family history, where the heritage is there. Algeria, my parents' homeland, the country where they were born, where they grew up, where they were young and where they lived through the war. The imprint remains after the passage. It is more than a trace."

Marie Claire Cano

The beauty of the Greek village of Olymbos, in the north of the island of Karpathos (Dodecanese), results from the dissonance between the rusticity of living conditions and the sumptuous splendor of festivities. There, the austerity of the landscapes, set between sea and mountains, contrasts with the richness of the local culture, where music holds pride of place.
The black and white images by Filippas N. Filippakis, the village's official photographer between 1945 and 1965, here echo the past in the midst of contemporary color photographs by Philippe Herren, a contemporary Swiss photographer.

Organized by Mélanie Nittis, doctoral student at Cerlom, winner of the Prix de la Maison des Cultures du Monde, in partnership with the Festival de l'Imaginaire and the Nisiotis association

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Poems and drawings by Jean and Anastassia Elias

The highly inventive and unexpected poetic language of Jean Elias, the sure and sensitive form of his verses, and the incredible richness of Anastassia Elias's illustrations mean that these creations cross the barriers of time and enchant anyone who approaches them, whatever their age or sensibility. Discover these poems and illustrations in our gallery from January 06 to February 20. As some of Jean Elias's poems were written in Arabic, then rewritten in French, they appear here in both Arabic and French versions, to the delight of language lovers.

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At the chance of a conversation, I learn that, barely 20 years after Estonia's independence, Russia has still not ratified an agreement on their common border. Taking an interest in the subject, I discover the existence of the Setos and Setomaa, a young kingdom as old as discord. Both in Estonia and Russia... But where does this fable come from? This is the starting point for my photographic work: to meet the Setos, to explore this strange territory poised in balance, to try to understand their "ethno-futuristic" approach to preserving and asserting their identities.

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