LE MUSÉE DES PROMESSES
Jardin d'Essai . Ouidah
“The starting point of all these promises is nature”
This garden is the place where the first conversations were born.
It stands as a veritable plant archive, preserving plants with age-old stories and infinite chapters. The land of Ouidah tells stories on a rare timescale of thousands of years: stories of climate change, of the people who lived there, of the kingdoms that ruled them. Each plant tells a unique tale: citrus trees long carried the promise of deportation and death , while palm trees tell stories of life, architecture, food, weaving... and medicinal plants embody other stories of survival and transformation.
The earth of the Jardin d'Essai can be read to understand what came before us, and today it gives life to an extraordinary work of art:
LE MUSÉE DES PROMESSES
This building emerges from the earth of Ouidah like a palimpsest. This highly contemporary work of minimal architecture, a cross between a building and a sculpture, bears witness to the present day through the layers of history that can be read in the vegetal archive that surrounds it. The work becomes a museum in itself, with a protocol established by Joël Andrianomearisoa, who will invite other artists to join him as the seasons progress.
Joël Andrianomearisoa has always been an architect. One who builds dreams and emotion. He conveys them in every text, every drawing, every mirror, every neon sign, every structure where the rigidity of the frame liberates forms and transcends poetry. Here, he creates his first concrete architecture.
“For me, the Musée des Promesses is an architectural Manifesto, something I want to experiment with today and replicate elsewhere, probably in Madagascar next. The question of architecture is important to me.
The question of a museum is important too. A museum represents the eternity: should memories be kept or forgotten? Is it more important to keep history? I'm not sure. What do we do with memories? What do we do with history today? Do we promise to keep them? To get rid of them? This is a very topical question in Benin today.
In the end, anything is possible in this museum of promises. It's a museum of all freedoms, of all possibilities in a way”.
On the eve of the Fondation Zinsou's 20th anniversary, le Musée des Promesses is a physical embodiment of the conversations and questions we have always shared with Joel Andrianomearisoa. This work questions the role of the museum institution in the 21st century, on the continent and elsewhere. Le Musée des Promesses is a space open to all, at all times. Its very openness to the world is embodied in its total absence of doors and visiting hours, abolishing all barriers to the public but creating new challenges for conservation and security. It defies all the established principles of a museum, and yet this is how it projects itself onto the world. It forces us to question what we have learned. A completely open museum makes us reflect on the work in its immediate environment, taking into account climate, heat and humidity. In this, it stands in stark contrast to the aseptic, climate-controlled White Cube, defined by the Western world as a museum standard. It makes us promise to invent our own standards, by looking at what surrounds us and taking into account our own specificities. It is as much a question as it is an answer. It is a monument to dreams and the future. It is the foundation's promise to artists, to its public, to the world...