For its first digital exhibition carried out in partnership with colleges and high schools, management has chosen, “for security reasons”, not to publish the drawings on which students had worked.
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The Museum-Mémorial du Terrorisme (MMT) does not yet have premises, but it inaugurated, on Saturday October 15, its first digital exhibition: “Facing terrorism, the exhibition of college students and high school students”. Virtual visitors can find the fruit of collaborative work between MMT, which must open its doors in 2027 in Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine), the Louvre school and a dozen colleges and high schools in Ile- of France. Podcast, choreography, music, collection of texts … The museum site exhibits all the productions of around 300 students who worked on educational projects around terrorism during the school year 2021-2022.
All, with the exception of those which included caricatures of Charlie Hebdo. For “security reasons for students and teachers”, explains Henry Rousso, historian and president of the museum prefiguration mission, the MMT decided not to put on its site the drawings on which some students had worked . Two establishments were concerned, according to information from the world.
In the first, a high school of the Academy of Versailles, the students had met victims and each of them had selected an object which evoked terrorism. Among the objects chosen: the “one” by Charlie Hebdo of January 14, 2015, on which Luz’s drawing is, everything is forgiven, representing the Prophet Muhammad. In the second, located in Paris, the teachers and students proposed to the museum an imaginary collection entitled “The arts in the face of terrorism” in which they had worked on the drawing of Cabu can we laugh at everything?
It was announced to them, in May, when the productions were finished and in the restitution phase, that everything that concerned the caricatures could not be the subject of a publication – possibility which had not been mentioned in launching the project. The teachers concerned opposed, in vain, the decision. They notably denounced excessive reluctance in contradiction with the spirit of the museum and an exhibition which wants to “face terrorism”.
vertigin complexity
“We are a prefiguration mission, we experience the problems as they arrive and a dilemma has arose at us once we have had to think about putting online caricatures”, explains Henry Rousso. Should we publish these projects, carried out in an approach of “resilience and resistance” to terrorism, which has attacked twice since 2015 – during the attack at Charlie Hebdo, then with the assassination of Samuel Paty, October 16, 2020 – Freedom of expression embodied by caricatures, at the risk of exposing students and teachers to threats? “In the current state of things, we have favored security,” assumes the president of the museum prefiguration mission.
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