Les Baumettes au musée : anciens et nouveaux objets patrimoniaux, de la guillotine aux graffitis

Abstract

The “musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée”, the Museum of Europe and Mediterranean Civilisations (Mucem) preserves a number of elements related to the world of prison and its representations. Prison is part of the collections in the form of etchings, caricatures, postcards collected through the diverse acquisitions and / or survey-collections that seek to gather, and document sets of objects both tangible and intangible, which bear witness to social issues. The museum has the specific feature to hold a collection dedicated to the graffiti movement, built up in the early 2000s. It has been involved since June 2019, together with the “Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel PACA”, PACA region’s General inventory of heritage, in a survey-collection in the Baumettes prison, specifically focusing on prison graffiti.The so-called historical Baumettes closed down permanently in June 2018 before its demolition scheduled for March 2020, postponed until July 2021. The “Adieu Baumettes” (“Farewell Baumettes”) project, conceived by the penitentiary Administration and launched with the European Heritage Days on 18 September 2019, hoped to give the Baumettes back to the inhabitants of Marseilles by reopening for a few weeks the historical part and by offering tours together with a cultural programming largely devoted to the history of this prison, where the last capital punishment was carried out in 1977, before the abolition of the death penalty. Within this context, the penitentiary Administration requested the loan of the guillotine kept in the collections of the Mucem. The survey-collection on “Graffiti and prison creations”, coincided with this exhibition project showcasing a specific object of the museum’s collections. Triggered by the coming destruction of the buildings, the mission of this survey-collection was the emergency preservation of the site’s memory which required in particular a photographic campaign that focused on the creation of a corpus about prison graffiti in line with the Graff collection and a collecting of objects to complete the existing collections on prison. The extension to prison graffiti seen as productions of convicts just as worthy of interest as caricatures or drawings preserved by the Mucem, reflects the growing interest, within both the academic field and the penitentiary Administration, in those ambiguous objects whose status oscillates between evidence of the past, creation and damage.

Keywords

• prison graffiti
• Baumettes
• exposed writings
• guillotine