Located in the heart of Geneva’s Old Town, the Barbier-Mueller Museum preserves, exhibits, and studies a collection of artworks of immense variety. Today, it comprises several thousand works spanning from antiquity to the present day and includes objects from every continent. Every six months, the Barbier-Mueller Museum offers new presentations of its collections and temporary exhibitions. The museum regularly invites contemporary artists to interpret the works in its collections and rethink the layout of the galleries, thereby shifting our understanding of the exhibited works over time. Lectures, talks, readings, and performances complement this exhibition program.
Pleasing the Spirits invites you on a journey through the Barbier-Mueller Collection, showcasing artworks from around the globe. Curated by Séverine Fromaigeat and Paul Maheke, the exhibition offers an open-ended exploration of diverse objects, awakening spirits and uncovering territories to discover.
Guided by medium Laura Kono, this intimate sensory encounter invites you to slow down and listen to the life held within a single object. Observe its details, settle into its textures and impressions, then enter a calm state of widened awareness and gentle channeling. The experience favors quiet curiosity and shared reflection, and finishes with a short exchange that lets you name what the object awakens. Playful, mysterious and quietly moving.
Appolinaire Oussou Lio, prince of the Tolinou people and founder of the NGO GRABE-Bénin, and Agboni Pascal Adanbadji, a Fa (bokonon) priest, discuss the reality of Beninese vodou. Moderated by journalist Emmanuel Grandjean, the conversation investigates vodou’s ties to nature and ancestral practices, the transmission of knowledge, and the balance between humans and other living beings. The session illuminates cultural, spiritual and ecological dimensions of vodou through testimony and dialogue.
In French.
Philippe Charlier, forensic physician, anthropologist and director of research, presents an investigation into the circulating metaphysics of spirits in the vodun of Benin and the voodoo traditions of Haiti. Following the avenging deity Heviosso, the egungun dances of Benin and the flight of spirits associated with zombi phenomena in Haiti, he examines rituals that position these entities as intermediaries between the living, the souls and the ancestors.
In French.
Philippe Charlier, forensic physician and anthropologist and research director at the Musée du quai Branly, draws on fieldwork in Africa and the Caribbean to investigate vodou cosmologies. Following the justicial divinity Heviosso, the egungun dances of Benin and the spirit flight with zombies in Haiti, he examines the circulating metaphysics of vodou, where gestures are meaningful and disease and death are rarely considered merely natural. Charlier presents powerful funeral rituals and the role of intermediaries between the living, souls and ancestors.
In French.
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