Arkoeologika is an exhibition linking the two community museums, the Musée archéologique d'Argentomagus in Saint-Marcel and the Musée de la Chemiserie et de l'Elégance masculine in Argenton-sur-Creuse. This unprecedented collaboration has as its starting point the carriageway. It is an archaeological fiction in which the visitor has to disentangle the true from the false between the real and the imaginary.
In Arkeologika I, excavation sites are evoked by large textile mosaics that place the visitor between reality and imagination. The archaeological metaphor continues at the Musée de la Chemiserie et de l'Elégance masculine, where the visitor is transported to the warehouse. Arkeologika II highlights the object discovered during the excavation campaigns. The textile creations of the two artists invite the visitor to discover marble busts, woven textiles, embroidered with historical connotations in a scenography reminiscent of the excavation camp.
In Arkeologika I, the scenography of the museum allows the visitor to understand the concept of carroyage through the reconstruction of a dedicated space, it also allows to understand the concept proposed by the artists.
Upon arrival, the visitor is invited to a first experience of the carriageway as an organization of our relationship to the world. Confronted with a semi-enclosed space by a hanging curtain in front of him and blocking the discovery of the installation placed behind, he is invited to discover it through the grid of a white chadri of Afghan girl. This grid, a few square centimeters, is reminiscent of the helmet of the gladiator!
Like the ancient decorations, a textile mosaic is imposed as object to look at the ground, materials to identify, reliefs and colors to interpret. Installed in the crypt of the museum, consisting of parallelograms embroidered on linen, like tesserae that have not yet been completely cleared by the archaeologist’s brush, metallic yarn and garance flax yarn obtained by the removal of a torn curtain of the eighteenth century, the skeins of an old Goblin unicorn partially eaten by moths, plastic bags collected in a supermarket vegetable section and many other surfaces, this colourful mosaic emerges here and there from areas of unbleached linen that evokes the earth, sand and rubble of a excavation site.