The Casting Museum An installation by Sophie Delpeux & Marc Bauer 03/06/2022 – 30/11/2022
This proposal for the moulding room of the Saint-Louis Hospital Library Museum is the result of a year of exchanges between Sophie Delpeux and Marc Bauer. In space, this dialogue takes the form of a co-creation entirely conditioned by the specificity of this place, its history, its uses, as well as the memories it preserves. A series of discreet interventions revisit them. This library-museum, whose nerve centre is the moulding room, was inaugurated at an international conference in 1889. This is an unparalleled hospital collection, preserved in its original presentation. This space was both dedicated to training, but also to the promotion of the French school of dermatology, whose birth, like fame, are linked to the Saint-Louis Hospital. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Baron Alibert has made this place the first skin disease clinic, attracting medical practitioners and students from all over the world. The systematic use of the representation of rare cases presented for consultation played an important role in this reputation. Nourished by the complementary looks of Sophie Delpeux and Marc Bauer, this installation seeks to change the conditions of visibility of this collection to reveal certain power relationships that gestures and medical looks can imprint on bodies in the nineteenth century. The installation unfolds in five steps from the access staircase, then on the landing and finally in the moulding room; all aim to move the physical presence as symbolic of the sick in this place to better question it.