Musée des Confluences

By Musée des Confluences

I was so impressed with this museum in Lyon that I wanted to comment on it by writing up my notes to this museum guide. It’s one of two very good museums in Lyon that we visited, the other being the Lugdunum - Musée et Théâtres romains.

The Musée des Confluences is a fairly recent update of a traditional museum of natural history. It presents the story of life on earth, including the role of homo sapiens in the diversity of cultures and the chain of life. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to four themes, looking at the work through both a scientific and a symbolic perspective.

More concretely, each section of the museum presents themes such as the origin of life through diverse artistic works as well as through a display of scientific knowledge. The first gallery opens with contemporary creation-story artworks from Inuit and Australian Indigenous peoples alongside models of early hominids that might have existed 25,000 years ago. Similar juxtapositions happen throughout the museum. For me, this puts the scientific facts in the museum into a broad human context, and gives meaning to a history of life that in other exhibitions can be very abstract. (The Lugdunum museum did something similar with the Gallo-Roman history.) It also shows a philosophical approach that values distinct kinds of knowledge, including ways of expressing humans’ relationships with the world.

The Origins gallery illustrates mind-blowing diversity of life, and where humans fit into it (almost invisible). It shows the evolution of life from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) to the domains of bacteria, archaea and eukarya (cellular organisms, where we fit) in response to the environment.

The Species gallery looks at aboriginal and European perspectives of how nature is connected and the impact of humans on the environment. It suggests that the human-animal boundary is just an idea that has existed in western thought for only about 300 years – and for many, it is breaking down again.

The Societies gallery looks at the social organization in religion, military objects, technologies. And the Eternities gallery looks at visions of the “beyond” through shamanism, funerary cultures and conceptions of death. These two galleries seemed a bit spotty and confused. It was as if the curators wanted to create a narrative from the variety of pieces in their collection rather than illustrating the narrative with their collection. Perhaps at this point, I was overloaded and didn’t see the connections they wanted to make, but reading the guide didn’t make it any more meaningful. More likely, the project of representing the meaning of human society and life in a few hundred objects and one hundred pages is too much to expect. Nevertheless, the galleries were a thoughtful exploration of some of the biggest themes in human thought, and worth more than an hour’s walk through.

The guide itself is an imaginative approach to representing the galleries. It’s bound into five sections, one for each gallery plus an introduction, with a fold-out cover wrapping around each section. It’s as if there were five separate booklets within one cover. Each one has many illustrations, with a minimum amount of text to highlight the ideas. I like the idea, but the binding makes the guide very stiff and it doesn't open well enough to comfortably view and think about the pages.

I also loved the building, a striking glass crystal enclosing the galleries and the related facilities on the point of land where the Saone and Rhone rivers converge. Rising on the escalator through the lobby up to the top of the building (and the excellent coffee shop) not only gives visitors a great view of the region, but it also creates a sense of openness and wonder that’s entirely appropriate for the museum.