Paris

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Musée du Quai Branly

NEW 29-55 quai Branly, 7th

Surrounded by trees on the banks of the Seine stands Paris' newest museum, the Musée du Quai Branly , a vast showcase for non-European cultures. Intended to ‘officially recognise the rightful place of these civilisations, together with the heritage of peoples who are sometimes forgotten, in the present culture of the world’, this is a museum with a mission.

With its angular forms and protuding, coloured metal boxes, Jean Nouvel's peculiar building is a surprisingly baroque construction, a hotchpotch of visual metaphors: a bridge museum between Europe (the one continent not represented here) and the four other continents that are; a river; a snake; a tropical jungle within an urban one.

With some 3,500 items on permanent display from a stock of some 300,000 items, drawn essentially from the dismantled Musée des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie and the ethnology collections of the Musée de l'Homme, the museum’s scope is indeed impressive. Treasures include a 10th-century anthropomorphic Dogon statue from Mali, Vietnamese costumes, Gabonese masks, Aztec statues, Peruvian feather tunics, rare frescoes from Ethiopia, animal hide and bark cloth garments from the Americas, and the Harter bequest of masks and sculptures from the Cameroon.

Dimly lit to create a shadowy, mysterious aura, the permanent collection is reached via a curving white ramp, a huge space divided into four zones for the four continents – Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australasia – that also lets you wander from one to another along a central path or ‘river’. A mezzanine gallery is used for pan-continental exhibitions. Music is a key feature of the interdisciplinary approach, with musical exhibits, a large auditorium that can be used for concerts, and a striking circular glass drum or ‘silo’ rising up through the building that allows intriguing glimpses of the instruments in reserve.

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