The exhibition “Alexandria: future previous” offers a round trip between past and present to deconstruct, without erasing it, the myth of the ancient Egyptian city.
By Pierre Barthélémy (Marseille)
There is, between Alexandria and Marseille, an obvious cousinage: these are two port, Mediterranean and cosmopolitan cities whose ancient founders were of Greek culture. Nothing could be more natural therefore to see the Marseille city welcome the exhibition “Alexandria: previous future” in its MUCEM which, designed in partnership with the Royal Museum of Mariemont (Belgium), was first presented at the Palais des Beaux- Brussels arts. The expression “previous future” was chosen to emphasize that if Alexandria is a very current city, it is nonetheless crushed by the weight of its ancient past and the grandiose imagination to which it refers.
Curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Royal Museum of Mariemont and one of the four curators of the exhibition, Arnaud Quartinmont concedes: “It’s complicated to make an exhibition on Alexandria because people want to see what it looked like. But it is not a city like Rome where the different historical strata remained. In Alexandria, there is no longer much to see today from the ancient city. We will therefore voluntarily frustrate the visitor: the Archeology is also to show the absence while explaining why there is nothing more … “Nothing anymore because the dream of Alexander the Great, his” new city “created ex nihilo, was destroyed by a tsunami in 365 and because each era has without respect buried the previous one.
In place of the famous lighthouse, slender towards the sky like a tower of Babel, vegète a strong Mamluk low of the front. Of the Mouseion, this scientific complex bearing the names of the Muses, which brought together a university, amphitheatres, the famous Library of Alexandria and its hundreds of thousands of texts, of this university campus before the hour when all the big scholars were to be found From the known world and where certain principles of physics have been discovered, nothing remains. Just a vague memory, a ghost. Worse: a fantasy.
“cosmopolitan city”
It is therefore in small indirect touches, from archaeological excavations, historical documents, numismatics too, that the city of Alexander is rebuilt, a city of powers and knowledge, the largest Mediterranean port of the ‘Antiquity, turned to international trade while Egyptian capitals usually had the Nile for the only horizon. Old Alexandrians, from their daily life, everything has passed out, very little subsistent. From the spirit of the city, on the other hand, we know much more. “It was a cosmopolitan city that brought together various populations around a common base, Greek culture, enriched with many local elements, underlines Arnaud Quartinmont. It was a world of mixing and movement.”
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