The adventure of an exhibition - On the tracks of the snake...

Description

"Rainbow, tiger, or minute; ringer, constrictor, or venom-spitter, it crawls, undulates, or rears up; it coils in the trees, buries itself in the earth, dwells at the bottom of the seas, and sometimes even, aerially, soars from one branch to another. Very often, it hides in the grass, the sand or the rocks. Its encounter frightens us. Yet its creeping, its powers and its beauty fascinate us, and its most secret actions intrigue us: it molts, regenerates, reproduces in many ways. Wherever snakes live, in the four corners of the world, the appearance and behavior of reptiles have inspired symbolic elaborations of singular interest to men. Twenty-two young curators set out on their trail, followed by apprentice scenographers. Two museums opened their collections to them, three schools and numerous researchers accompanied them. This book tells the adventure of an exhibition. A hermeneutic and museological journey between art and anthropology, it poses the question: how can we understand and exhibit non-Western art? It presents a novel museographic experiment: the surprising encounter of "natural" snakes and artifacts from the five continents."