english

About the museum

Musée Caché (Hidden Museum) is a non-profit organization that was created in Paris in 2015. The founding collections consist of minerals, singular objects and micrographies. It aims at triggering people’s curiosity and providing this latter as a means of learning for them to use freely. Its activities – also termed secret services – are transient and addressed to any sort of audience.

Musée Caché endeavours to bridge the continuity between the living and the inert, object and subject, nature and culture, matter and philosophy. On those grounds, it devises tools that help reintegrating the human and the non-human, thus leading the way towards a certain autonomy as far as the elaboration of knowledge is concerned.

Secret Services

Condensation

Presentation: Access to the Archives (2h)
Lecture on minerals and their metaphors. Visual projection of different archives from the museum’s collection.

Pocket Museum: Access to the Collections (2h)
Initiation to the intimacies of the mineral world. Mineral collections classed according to their size are slowly displayed and presented following their singularities.

 
Sublimation

Workshops & Seminars :

Minting of Coins (20h)
An experience of creating and minting a personal coin thanks to a casting technique which simplifies the transformation of a clay modelled object into metal. A trip from softness to hardness, from pottery to metallurgy ; a reflection on our own values and that of coins. Which would be our own coin if we had the possibility to make it?

The Art of Doing without Effort (12h)
Exploring sessions coming up with habitual and non-habitual slackened off movements, and developping an acute awareness of our skeletal structure that enables us to decrease effort and improve the quality of movement. The attention is paid to the process of movements itself rather than to their mere achievement.

Collaborating with materials (20h)
Elaboration of an artistic project led in accordance with the language and preferences of each material. Reflection on the intimate dialogue that unfolds itself between matter and imagination and the way it is handled in contemporary art. How to plan an artwork without imposing ideas and shapes on the selected material? How discover its own needs?

The Pedagogy of Treasures (5h)
Going through the experiment of encountering palpable mineral treasures awaiting in chests with a secret combination. Exploring processes of discovery and elaboration of contents.

Research in situ: Documents of the Invisible
This research explores invisible worlds that are hiding in a specific environement. The observation of samples of water, air or earth under a microscope allows us to document the discoveries we have made through these incursions into the unknown.

Artist in Residence: Call for Applications
Artists, writers and researchers are invited to consult the archives, collections and investigations of the Hidden Museum, in order to initiate a personal approach of this unusual immersion into mineral curiosities.

 
Crystallization

Boutique en valise (Shop in a suitcase)
Boutique en valise is included in every request of the museum’s services, giving access to samples (archive images), to specimens (minerals, fossils and biominerals), to replicas (reproductions of the collection works) and to publications.

Dissolution

Concealment of Works
Intervention which consists of hiding works within a specific space or collection.

Donations & Certificates
Exchange and reception of donations and certificates.