EXHIBITIONS

Enchanted journey: Amsterdam, Bamako, Geneva… but who knows the song?

Without songs, no places, no stories, no revolutions, no memories nide Love Story. Songs enchant the world, for better and sometimes for worse, as when their heady tunes conceal a racist or sexist vision. Songs recount, bear witness to and, in some cases, transform the world; they are the vehicles of our geographical imaginations. Welcome to this exhibition-game devoted to the relationship between popular songs and places. It is a playful extension of the three books Monde enchanté; Villes enchantées; Voyage enchanté (Editions Georg, 2021, 2022, 2024). We propose an enchanted journey like a treasure hunt, to be followed in the order of your desires.

Deeply rooted in many civilizations since time immemorial, the figure of the labyrinth has never ceased to fascinate writers and artists. A place for representing space and reading the world, it houses at its heart the Minotaur, a half-man, half-beast creature whose dual nature reflects the bivalent aspect of the labyrinth: exploration and perdition, a structured yet confusing space, whose regularly laid paths nonetheless lead astray…

What child hasn’t dreamed of setting off to explore so many distant lands with such evocative names in front of his or her Atlas. The fastidious geographer, lover of beautiful, realistic and precise maps, may not find what he’s looking for here. Ptolemy, Mercator, longitudes and latitudes, parallels and meridians are not our domain, but the history of a place is fortunately also mapped by the imagination, by its anecdotes and stories, more or less fabulous. But above all, it constantly opens up new territories to be discovered, as each of us is keen to map out our own desires and needs.

The exhibition, which required the exhumation of largely unpublished maps, extravagantly reveals a few facets of an unsuspected Lake Geneva.

Described as expensive, boring and lacking the advantages of a large capital city when the League of Nations was set up in 1920, Geneva nonetheless had a lot to offer. to meet the demands of international diplomacy. These include grand hotels, parks and gardens. They provide the setting for diplomatic banquets and more informal receptions, such as dinners and cocktail parties. These are all places where socialites and diplomats rub shoulders. These spaces stage and shape representations of a certain “international culture”.

The ghosts that undulate at the bottom of the lake, at the mercy of sometimes violent currents, are the guardians of sunken treasures. The magnificence of the wealth accumulated over time by tragic shipwrecks amplifies the legend of a fortune stagnating in the depths. A long and difficult investigation begins. Some objects thought lost will reappear in unusual places. Torn from death, they re-emerge in our world. The surprise of these discoveries is matched by the mystery that surrounds them.
If ghosts are part of the gloomy secret of the deep, the resurrected treasures of Lake Geneva are part of the mystery of resurrection.

Les Bains invites you to travel down the Rhône and back in time as photographer Fred Boissonnas takes you on a journey across the Mediterranean in the footsteps of Homer’sOdyssey.

The exhibition retraces the investigation carried out by the Genevan photographer and scientist Victor Bérard to locate the itinerary of Ulysses, the gods’ battered hero, from Marseilles to Djerba, from Gibraltar to Ithaca. As a translator of theOdyssey, Bérard was convinced he could find the places in the Mediterranean that would have inspired Homer to imagine the adventures of Ulysses. For him, the key to poetry lies in the shapes of the Mediterranean coastline, in the crash of waves on rocks, in the force of wind and sea currents. They’ll bring back hundreds of images to prove it…

The Bodmer Foundation’s rare books are yours for the taking.

Organized around five themes – content, size, exhibition, restoration and material – this tour invites you to follow the destiny of exceptional books, from their restoration in the intimacy of the workshop to their public magnificence in the museum’s showcases.Writers, restorers, researchers and passionate bibliophiles are, for photographer Naomi Wenger, the focal points for getting to the heart of books, from their materials to the mystery that surrounds them,

This exhibition takes us back over two hundred years, to the fascinating context of the great scientific expeditions of the late ^18th and early ^19th centuries.

This is the story of an adventure between a Spanish doctor, Martin de Sessé y Lacasta (1751-1808 ), and a Mexican botanist, José Mariano Mociño (1757-1820).

It’s also the story of Geneva botanist Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle (1778-1841), who taught in Montpellier and later founded the Geneva Botanical Garden.

Last but not least, it’s the story of the tremendous enthusiasm of dozens of ” ladies of Geneva “, copying hundreds of these drawings in April 1817.

A drop of water from Lake Geneva magnified under the microscope reveals life intense, and often incredibly beautiful! Diatoms are found here, tiny, unicellular algae with astonishing shapes that live suspended in water. Present in all aquatic environments, they live either in colonies or in isolation. Lake Geneva counts over 500 different species. So, when you “drink the cup inadvertently during a swim, it may be “a whole world swallowed!

The mountains, a laboratory for Geneva’s scientists.

At the end of the 18th century, a handful of Genevan scientists and naturalists
discover the peaks surrounding Geneva.
An exploration that leads to a high point:
Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s ascent of Mont-Blanc in August 1787.
A feat that will be widely echoed across Europe
which will generate unprecedented interest in the Chamonix valley.