Fanny Fouché
Phd in Medieval Art History and Museology (summa cum laude)
Main research thematic
- Medieval and Sacred Art
- Architecture and Liturgy
- Cult of the relics in the Middle Ages, reliquaries, Christian material culture
- The Power of matters and images in Christian medieval materiality
- Philosophy of museums, museology, history of collecting
- Museography and history of the museum’s displays
- Museum and the Sacred
- Appropriate museology
Among the incoming particular themes:
The relationship to the past within museums and the mechanisms surrounding the elaboration of stories, mythifications, reconstructions and political manipulations of the past (and therefore also of the future) through the museal processes.
The thorny and so topical question of the decolonization of museums and museology and the need to be able to consider the importance of this renewal also in the face of our own national heritage.
Address: Verrieres-le-Buisson, Île-de-France, France
Main research thematic
- Medieval and Sacred Art
- Architecture and Liturgy
- Cult of the relics in the Middle Ages, reliquaries, Christian material culture
- The Power of matters and images in Christian medieval materiality
- Philosophy of museums, museology, history of collecting
- Museography and history of the museum’s displays
- Museum and the Sacred
- Appropriate museology
Among the incoming particular themes:
The relationship to the past within museums and the mechanisms surrounding the elaboration of stories, mythifications, reconstructions and political manipulations of the past (and therefore also of the future) through the museal processes.
The thorny and so topical question of the decolonization of museums and museology and the need to be able to consider the importance of this renewal also in the face of our own national heritage.
Address: Verrieres-le-Buisson, Île-de-France, France
less
InterestsView All (12)
Uploads
Papers by Fanny Fouché
The Middle Ages reconstructed. Variations on ecclesiastical
implementation in exhibition spaces
A variety of approaches can be adopted in the patrimonial transmission of
religious objects. One such approach is concentrated on highlighting the
technical, historical or aesthetic aspects of pieces to the detriment of the
mentioning of former modes of efficiency. The artifacts are thus presented for their material qualities, how they can be typologized and as markers in formal histories. Another approach prefers to shed light on the socio-historic conditions that make it so that certain types of objects, at one point or another, are charged with sacred meaning. Regardless of where an institution situates itself between the two, the reappearance of objects associated with the Invisible is a challenge for a museum. Is the goal to reconstruct the intangible environment surrounding them? Can material fragments of lost or transformed religious practices allow for the reconstruction, in museum spaces, of a vision of religious practices, the organization of societies, rich networks of symbols and lost customs? What levels of meaning are expographic norms able to transcribe for objects such as those relating to Western medieval spirituality? Are they able to create exhibition and discussion spaces that accurately reflect the pre-museographical visibility and operability of these types of objects? Expographic trial and error around numinous heritage have to do with the retelling of History through the selection and handling of its vestiges. These experiments question the boundary between what is real and reconstructed, the authentic and the reproduction, between effects of signifying and effects of presence (to borrow the terms coined by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht). Through objects relating to Christianity, this article aims to describe the resurgence of forms such as the outline of an altar or a cross as freeform variations on the characteristics of religious practice and medieval ecclesiastical spaces. Far beyond pointing out simple similarities with original elements, we aim to question the ways in which these deviations inform the artifacts that surround them and serve to support or destroy their anthropological meaning. In addition, Hayden Whites and Stephen Bann’s work make possible an examination of the extent to which the “museumification” of medieval civilization plays with both synecdoche and metonymy. Finally, by approaching the long rumination and reconstruction that this civilization has undergone during its patrimonial assimilation, this article touches on the dialogue with objects, that are, by their very nature, epiphanic (i.e.: destined to be effaced in the very moment they are revealed), as a sort of game of hide and seek with the missing parts of objects that open them up to mystery.
Western Museums have composed themselves from fragments born in different cultures, integrated into the matrix of their own exhibition logic. This appropriation thus constitutes a confrontation between the competing values that objects have inherited in systems from which they came, and the values upon which the museum institution itself was built. As an entity on this border between immediate presence and connective transcendence, the altarpiece is proposed here as a locus to observe the dynamic process of sacralization. Finally, the journey of the altarpiece from the ecclesiastical place interrogates, on a theoretical level, the transfer of sacredness at work in its displacement.
Book Reviews by Fanny Fouché
d’architecture, Le dessin d’architecture : œuvre/outil des architectes, Varia, n° 30, 2è semestre 2015, p. 105-116.
Talks by Fanny Fouché
Thème de recherche : "Regards croisés sur la façon dont le passé peut devenir un modèle – sur le plan historique, sociologique, psychologique, politique, artistique, littéraire et linguistique – après un processus de « fixation » et de « reconstruction » de ce qui, à la base, avait l’imperfection, la complexité et l’irréductibilité de la réalité même."
Conference Presentations by Fanny Fouché
Drafts by Fanny Fouché
Translated version of the article published (pp. 100-104)
Conferences by Fanny Fouché
Placer une rencontre sur la thématique des « Saisie(s) de la présence » sous la houlette du Centre d’Anthropologie culturelle de Paris-Cité et le faire au contact des instantanés photographiques recueillis par l’œil sensible de Ferrante Ferranti devrait contribuer à cerner ce qui caractérise l’avènement de la présence et permettre d’enrichir ainsi la réflexion entourant les enjeux de sa réélaboration et de sa transmission patrimoniale.
Thesis Chapters by Fanny Fouché
museums. It chooses Christian reliquaries and their inscription in architectural settings, ritual and liturgical performances in the Medieval Church as an observatory position to consider their later redeployments. In order to write a diachronic story of the different settings surrounding
these peculiar objects throughout times, this PhD mobilizes the philosophical concepts of “visibility and display” (from Foucault & Agamben), “cultural transfer” (Espagne), “appropriation” (Banxandall) and the notion of “framing” (Grave, Van Eck & Phélan).
Considering two enunciative systems separated in time, this work confronts in-depth analyses of the reliquaries among medieval visuality with comprehensive descriptions of their subsequent museological apparitions. The first chapters investigate the interactions between
what P. Brown has called the “special dead”, the shrines built to house them, and the gleaming materials chosen to reflect Heaven’s glory. These pages focus on the articulation of reliquaries, treasure chests, Church barriers and treasuries in the dynamic elaboration of the sacred based on the manifestation of liminality in Medieval Christianity. In a religion characterized by the Incarnation of an invisible God, relics appear here on a fragile border between created and uncreated, visibility and invisibility, presence through absence, seeing and believing. The
journey of these precious fragments of medieval art and spirituality away from their former enshrining leads the second part of this study to question museological transcriptions and interpretations of the sacred over a long period of time. Chronologically and then thematically,
it brings together new scenes of apparition around reliquaries from permanent installations, temporary exhibitions, and contemporary church treasuries (exhibition units come from France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy and Great Britain). Choosing the reliquary as a locus to observe the dynamic of sacralization in Medieval devotion, this essay queries the processes of historical appropriations of sacred objects, negotiations between the former meanings and uses
of these, and the transfer of sacredness. It underlines the extent to which exhibiting is always an interpretative operation framing both the art and society it stages and the figure of the museum itself inseparable from one’s own system of belief and authority.