Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (mucem)
(courtesy of Patafisik, Wikimedia Commons)
Just when you thought you’d heard everything, the digital magazine Hyperallergic reports that a new spin on community engagement at a French museum in Marseilles is letting it all hang out.
For its current exhibition Paradis naturistes, a look at the rise of nudist communities in Europe, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (mucem) is also revolutionizing the traditional museum dress code.
Visitors can strip off to walk through the multimedia displays in their birthday suits led by a tour guide as naked as they are on Sept. 3 and Oct. 11. All other viewing days you’ll have to keep your gear on.
The museum has partnered with French nudist groups to lead the tours. Devotees of naturism, active in France since 1920, also helped the curators gather artifacts that document the philosophy and way of life. The exhibition begins with medieval images of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and continues through feminist nudism, a movement intended to wrest the female body from the male gaze and imbue it with female agency.
The exhibition, on view through Dec. 9, includes more than 600 nudist magazine covers, paintings, posters, photographs, films, sculptures, and advertisements, such as one from the 1930s that extols naturism as a cure for cancer and capitalism. A catalogue of the exhibition is available from the museum.
France is a leading tourist destination in Europe for nudists. It seems that Mucem’s nude tours are not the first ones. In 2018, a New Yorker writer Thomas Rogers reported on taking a nudist tour through an exhibition of contemporary at the Palais de Tokyo. The most uncomfortable part of being naked in a museum, he wrote, was the chilly temperature.
Source: Hyperallergic
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