PARIS.- The Albert-Kahn Museum’s current exhibition, A Return Trip to Benin. Shared Perspectives on Dahomey, from 1930 to today (Bénin aller-retour. Regards sur le Dahomey de 1930), offers a reinterpretation of the films and photographs produced during a mission to Dahomey (now Benin) led from January to May 1930 by Catholic missionary Francis Aupiais and camera operator Frédéric Gadmer for Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet. This immersion, meant as a Franco-Beninese dialogue, questions the views on non-European cultures in a context of colonial rule and the birth of ethnography.

A singular mission for the Archives of the Planet

Following on from a series of inaugural exhibitions dedicated to travel and gardens, the Albert-Kahn Museum continues to explore the fundamental themes of its collections, this time focusing on perspectives on non-European cultures and the ethnographic dimension of the Archives of the Planet, recently added to the UNESCO “Memory of the World” Register.

The 1930 mission to Dahomey was unique in several ways: it was the only foray by the Archives of the Planet into sub-Saharan Africa, the last major expedition before the project was halted due to Albert Kahn’s bankruptcy, and the result of an initiative by an atypical clergyman, Father Francis Aupiais (1877-1945). This missionary priest, committed to a long-term endeavor to improve knowledge of African cultures, contacted Albert Kahn in 1927 and convinced him to finance his project to document Dahomey’s cultural and religious practices, in line with the philanthropist’s humanist views.

One of the first film collections of French ethnography

Father Aupiais’s goal was to promote an “African recognition” by documenting the traditional culture of Dahomey, particularly royal ceremonies and vodun rituals, which he held in high esteem. The mission lasted four and a half months, during which Frédéric Gadmer produced 1,102 autochromes (color photographs) and shot 140 film reels under Aupiais’s direction. These films, the first of this scale to be shot in Dahomey, constitute the largest collection of films in the Archives of the Planet and one of the first film collections of French ethnography, five years after the founding of the Paris Institute of Ethnology and one year before the Dakar-Djibouti mission.

Recently digitized in high definition (4K), these films constitute the narrative arc of the exhibition, which aims to present the outline, challenges, and legacy of this unusual mission, a century later. Projected in large format throughout an immersive journey, they offer unprecedented image quality and immerse visitors in the intimacy of Dahomey’s ceremonies and cults, forging links between yesterday’s protagonists and today’s visitors, between France and Benin.

Numerous objects, in a large part loaned by the musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, echo the still and moving images: emblems of power, vodun artifacts, and tools dedicated to divination are striking in their sophistication, matching the uses for which they were intended, documented in the films. These rare pieces also feature items exhibited in France by Father Aupiais himself.

Views from contemporary African artists

A Return Trip to Benin also questions the contemporary reception of images from 1930 through the eyes of artists from the African continent. Serving as a perspective and critical counterpoint, artworks by Ishola Akpo, Thulani Chauke, Sènami Donoumassou, Bronwyn Lace, Roméo Mivekannin, Angelo Moustapha, and Marcus Neustetter, several of which were created specifically for the exhibition, combine painting, photography, installation, and performance, reappropriating and reactivating the photographs and films.

Throughout the exhibition, views and perspectives are shared to build new narratives that respect Beninese sensibilities and knowledge. This approach was made possible thanks to numerous partnerships with heritage experts in Benin, both within the project’s scientific committee and during two documentation missions carried out on site by the Albert-Kahn Museum in 2023-2024, thus continuing Albert Kahn’s program: “train oneself to see, train oneself to know.”

A Return Trip to Benin. Shared Perspectives on Dahomey, from 1930 to today (Bénin aller-retour. Regards sur le Dahomey de 1930) is an exhibition created by the Département des Hauts-de-Seine – Musée départemental Albert-Kahn / Albert-Kahn Museum.

Curators:

• Julien Faure-Conorton, head of research and scientific promotion of the collections, Albert-Kahn Museum

• David-Sean Thomas, exhibition manager, Albert-Kahn Museum