Diop’s new film about art restitution has made her a French media fixture.
The Musée du Quai Branly is a long ark of a building perched over a garden, whose foliage screens the museum from its busy namesake thoroughfare on the banks of the Seine. Literally overshadowed by the Eiffel Tower, it houses more than three hundred thousand pieces of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, most of them legacies of France’s colonial empire. Its opening, in 2006, was billed as an enlightened departure from the practice of exhibiting non-European works as anthropological specimens; the building’s architect, Jean Nouvel, described it as a place of spiritual regeneration, where the Western curatorial apparatus would “vanish before the sacred objects so we may enter into communion with them.” But the vibes within are less enchanting than uncanny. The cavernous main gallery is a maze of shadows and imitation mud walls, where masks look out from between oversized photographs of tropical vegetation. “I’ll never be familiar with this space,” Mati Diop said when we visited last month. “It’s like ‘The Matrix.’ ”
Denne historien er fra November 04, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra November 04, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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MEAN TIME
“Hard Truths.”
ENLIGHTEN ME
The secret beauty of mandalas.
THE BEST OF THEM
His was a genius for the ages. Will Gottfried Leibniz ever get his due?
DEATH CULT
Yukio Mishima’ tortured obsessions were his making—and his unmaking.
Prophecy
The night of Dev’s twenty-second birthday, he was invited to sit with the elders after dinner.
A TALE OF TWO DISTRICTS
Lauren Boebert and Colorado’s red-blue divide.
THE TIKTOK TRAIL
Andean migrants draw others to the U.S. with videos depicting themselves as living the American Dream.
LOVE AND THEFT
Did a best-selling romantasy novelist steal another writer's story?
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STILL PROCESSING
Why is the American diet so deadly?