september 19 and 20 - Exhibition dedicated to the " dialogue of civilizations"

As part of this year's European Heritage Days on September 19 and 20, the Collège de France is staging an exhibition entitled "The Dialogue of Civilizations", where the general public can discover rare and precious objects collected over the centuries by professors and researchers at the Collège de France, and housed in the libraries and research laboratories that make up the Institute of Civilizations.

Three exceptional objects are particularly noteworthy in this exhibition:

The Sannô matsuri scroll: this 17th-century Japanese silk painting depicts a procession from the shrine to the town of Otsû, on the occasion of the "Festival of the King of the Mountain"; highly colorful, the painting teems with characters and details, providing an excellent, almost candid illustration of daily life in pre-modern Japan. Extremely fragile, this 7m-long scroll will be unrolled for the first and last time before being digitized.

The 3-D model created by Claude Lévi Strauss himself, as part of his work on the structural analysis of myths, to account for the contrasts between the myths of three neighboring Amerindian tribes. He later reduced it to a diagram in one of his books. Preserved at the Claude Lévi Strauss Anthropology Laboratory, this model is an exceptional testimony to the great anthropologist's thinking.

Glass plates featuring photographs of Palmyra, Syria, late 19th-early 20th century. Illustrating the diversity of the heritage collections held in the Collège de France libraries, these plates were produced during the first excavation campaigns led by Ernest Renan in this region, in the^2nd half of the 19th century. At the time, they were used to publicize discoveries, and are now a valuable source of information on inaccessible archaeological areas.

The exhibition also features a scale model and visuals of the real estate project for the future Institut des Civilisations that the Collège de France is developing at 52 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, and whose architectural design has been entrusted to the Jacques Moussafir agency.