By presenting human remains preserved naturally or according to ancient techniques, the exhibition “Mummies. Preserved body, eternal body” questions our relationship to death.
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opening ten days before All Saints’ Day and the Day of the Dead, the exhibition of the Toulouse Museum dedicated to mummies is not just a collection of preserved bodies beyond the death. Egypt or the Chilean desert of Atacama. It is above all an opportunity for visitors, whatever they are, to wonder about their personal relationship to death and its most immediate demonstration, the corpse.
In most human societies, the body is hidden, even backwards, as struck by a taboo. Parodiant the Tartuffe de Molière, we play “cover this body that I cannot see, by such objects the souls are injured.” And, in fact, that it ends in ashes in an urn or whether it is dismembered and left in grazing to the scavengers, or even eaten by the relatives of the deceased during a ceremony of ritual cannibalism, the fleshy body ends most often by disappearing for, at best, to become skeleton.
However, among the some 100 billion humans who preceded us, some have kept, in their posthumous existence-if we can allow yourself oxymoron -the appearances and the attires of the living they were. The flesh and the skin on the bones have resisted the squads of death, these insects and these bacteria which cause unbearable decomposition and putrefaction.
to ensure the deceased an eternal life
The Toulouse exhibition therefore narrates this mummy novel, starting of course with artificial mummies, those that humans have created thanks to an adequate treatment of corpses, as was notably the case in ancient Egypt To ensure an eternal life in the deceased – provided that his moral behavior allows him. An important part is also granted to the Andean mummies, a region where the first techniques of preservation of the bodies were invented.
However, there are other mummy categories. We thus have natural, when the environment presents particular physico -chemical conditions – drought or extreme cold, peat bogs … There are also scientists, and we think in particular of the mummified flashes of the French anatomist Honoré Fragonard (1732-1799) or to the skillfully embalmed bodies of Lenin and Mao Zedong.
To set up this somewhat special exposure, the Toulouse museum had to answer a sensitive question: what to do not hit the public, even if it knows what to expect? Because the face-to-face with a real corpse is without common measure with the viewing of a fiction film, as morbid and bloody as it is. Decision was therefore made to exhibit human remains behind windows without tain accompanied by a specific pictogram. It is only by a voluntary act, by pressing a switch illuminating the mummy, that the visitor confronts it. We can therefore choose to escape death, at least for this time.
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