Agenda

The exhibition (Der erschöpfte Mann) takes a stroll through the European cultural history of the male. Eyewitnesses from the past 2,000 years, drawn from philosophy, society, and medicine, illustrate the concept of maleness and the struggle surrounding it. Throughout history, men have created countless heroic ideals for themselves. Since ancient times, the preferred arenas for demonstrating masculinity have been arts, war, technology, politics, and sport, but also the broader field of marriage, family, and sexuality. Featuring around 200 objects from cultural history and art history, the show examines how ideals of masculinity have changed over the centuries.

The participative exhibition Beurk! Yuck! Igitt! The food we love to hate is based on stories the visitors shared on the museum’s designated website about the food they loathe. The Museum has taken this panoply of material to present an interactive and engaging contemplation of the emotion of disgust, analysing it from cultural, religious, social, historical and scientific aspects.

In 1825, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) wrote “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” With the exhibition, the Alimentarium takes the opposite approach to this now famous adage. Its new temporary exhibition, the first to be based on an emotion, explores food disgust by endeavouring to address the saying “Tell me what you don’t eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

In December 2019, Alimentarium set up a specific platform, inviting online visitors worldwide to share their thoughts on the food they find revolting. Their stories served as the basis for the exhibition. Visitors are invited to dive into the history of favourite food and pet hates via interactive exhibits and demonstrations that arouse all our senses, focusing on four main aspects of this topic: biology, ethics, aesthetics, and sustainable development.

The exhibition is dedicated to Lionel O’ Radiguet (1857-1936). Nowadays he is hardly known in France, his native country, and Switzerland, his country of choice. At the time, however, he was a well-known personality. He was born in Brittany. O’ Radiguet was a great traveller, in his early years an officer in the French Navy, a member of the French consular corps in China, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Lausanne, a scholar, writer, entrepreneur and painter. His parents came from Ireland and he has always been interested in Celtic and Irish culture and history.

This interest led him to St Ursanne (canton of Jura, in these days canton of Bern) in 1894. This town was the seat of the Irish monk St. Ursanne at the beginning of the seventh century. The beautiful Romanesque church (Collégiale) from the eleventh and twelfth centuries is dedicated to this saint. From 1904 he settled permanently in Saint-Ursanne. However, he did not forget Brittany and in 1904 he published a constitution for the Republic of Brittany (Constitution nationale pour une République bretonne). He also published on the history of the Jura and Switzerland and initiated/imagined many projects, including a canal from Basel to Nantes (via St Ursanne), a spa with the mineral water of the Bel-Oiseau spring and even a golf course near St Ursanne. He organised an international competition for pipe smokers and lobbied for the development of the railways.

The exhibition examines the life of this forgotten Swiss citizen (he was granted Swiss nationality in 1918) and some of his paintings from the period 1906-1916. Also on display are works of art from the church and the history of this beautiful medieval town.

From prehistoric times until the 1970s, objects for the household or daily use were stored and repaired. They often survived for many generations. The use of natural raw materials, the lack of (financial) resources, and human creativity as well as old crafts, made this possible. It changed in the consumer society and by the use of plastics and its derivatives. Many technical devices (computers, mobile phones)  became disposable items.

The exhibition (Jeter versus conserver) sheds light on old craft techniques and the preservation of objects by repairing and caring for the material and shows examples of repair techniques and restored objects. It is, above all, a meaningful exhibition for young people. They demonstrate for the climate, but they often show no care for materials and the sustainable use of natural raw materials and technical devices. They make the reparation the exception.

The Mint Cabinet (Münzkabinett) Winterthur has a unique collection of Greek coins before and during the Roman rule. The exhibition “Griechen 3.0” makes part of it accessible to the public. Various audio stations guide visitors through the exhibition; they tell the history, bring images from the Greek and Roman world back to life.

The coin cabinet also has a large collection of other coins from the period 600 B.C. to 280 A.D. Not only from Roman and Greek culture, but also from Persia, Celtic tribes, Armenian rulers, Parthians and Celts.

Humans share a history with  chickens that goes back over 8,000 years. It originated in Asia, where the wild ancestor of the chicken still lives in the jungle. Over the course of the 20th century, the domestic chicken was bred into a mass-market product. Today there are three times as many chickens in the world as humans.

The exhibition tells the fascinating story of how humans came to breed chickens and the importance they have today. It shows the surprising variety of wild chickens and reveals how chickens live, where we encounter chickens in everyday life, and where our chicken meat and eggs come from.

The exhibition  (I disegni giovanili di Le Corbusier. 1902 1916) is dedicated to the drawings of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, later Le Corbusier (1887-1965), which were created between 1902 and 1916. It shows more than eighty unpublished original drawings from public and private Swiss collections and includes numerous reproductions of drawings from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris (this foundation owns around 5,000 drawings). He entered the school of art and applied arts (L’Ecole d’art et d’art appliqué à l’industrie ) in his hometown La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1902. 1916 is the year before he moved to France in 1917 and opened an architectural practice in Paris.

The exhibition is arranged chronologically. It begins with his school days, and first architecture, then moves on to his travels and stays in European capitals in Italy, Paris, Berlin, and other German cities, and then to Eastern Europe, Istanbul, and Athens.

The other part shows his return and his stay in La Chaux-de-Fonds (1912-1916). During this time he also devoted himself to painting and drawing. He drew landscapes, animals, portraits, nudes, still lifes, and meticulously precise designs for watches, his first education at school.  But during this time he decided to study architecture, also on the advice of Charles L’Eplattenier (1874-1946), his professor at his school in La Chaux-de-Fonds. (Source and further information: www.arc.usi.ch/en/tam). 

The exhibition (Krieg und Frieden. Bilderchroniken aus der Frühzeit der Alten Eidgenossenschaft) presents a selection of richly illustrated chronicles from the 15th century onwards. Individual Orte and towns and increasingly the Eidgenossenschaft as an alliance of independent Orte/towns show their history, war and peace in the beautifully decorated handwritten chronicles. Some of the most important of these manuscripts are exhibited: a.o. The Tschachtlan Chronicle, the Great Chronicle of the Burgundian Wars (Grosse Burgunderchronik) by Diebold Schilling the Elder (1445-1486), the Schodol Chronicle from Bremgarten, the Zurich Edlibach Chronicle, the first authentic cityscape of Zurich, the earliest manuscript with the history of Arnold Winkelried (the hero of the battle of Sempach in 1386), the first map of the Swiss Confederation and the first printed atlas of Switzerland.

The life of the painter, writer, critic, and enlightened thinker Józef Czapski  (1896 -1993) practically coincides with the whole of the 20^th century. Born in Poland, Czapski grew up in the waning days of the Russian Empire. He took part in both World Wars as a soldier and officer. In the First World War as Polish Cavalry officer, in the Second World War first as a prisoner of war after the Soviet-Union had invaded Poland in September 1939 (he was one of the rare survivors of the Katyn massacre), then in the Polish Armed Forces in the Middle-East against Germany after 22 June 1941. After the war, he settled near Paris. He restarted painting and writing after the war. His early artistic output was destroyed during the war. Through a selection of diaries, books, drawings and paintings the exhibition brings to the fore his creative process and works. The Maison des arts Plexus in Chexbres is featuring another fifty of his works in parallel with the foundation’s show.

What is the definition of ‘exotic’ in Switzerland or elsewhere? This changing notion still conditions the way we look at the world today. Two centuries ago Switzerland had a different view of countries of Europe and other continents and its inhabitants. The exhibition explores the relationship between Switzerland and abroad in the Age of Enlightenment but also offers a link to the 21st century and an understanding of the (changed) worldviews. Numerous activities, artistic installations and collaborations with other cultural and historical institutions accompany this exhibition, which also addresses current and sensitive topics.