The museum as archive

Colloquium organized jointly by the Musée du Louvre and the Collège de France

• May 6 at the Musée du Louvre
• May 7 at the Collège de France

Due to the health situation, the colloquium will be held behind closed doors, but the recording will be available on the Collège de France website from Friday June 25, 2021.

The museum as archive

By posing the question of the museum as archive, this double study day, jointly organized by the Musée du Louvre and the Collège de France, aims as much to reflect on the place of the archive in the museum as to question the way in which the museum institution embodies a certain collective memory of the objects, knowledge and acquisition policies associated with them.

To consider the museum as an archive is to place the history of its collections in a specific political, social and cultural context. While provenance research is one of the most important ways of studying the museum at source, it is also an invaluable field of research for the history of scientific practices. This is borne out by the number of works that examine the role of the museum in the professionalization of historical disciplines, the actions of the various agents involved in this movement, and the intellectual issues at play in the production, presentation and transmission of knowledge determined by the museum framework.

The aim of this meeting is to highlight the diversity of approaches permitted by the exploration of the Musée du Louvre's archive collections, by bringing together the researchers who work with these documents on a daily basis.