Podcast Summary

Podcast: Le Cours de l'histoire (France Culture)

Episode: Art et archives, une histoire d'émotions : Préhistoire ou Verdun, quand le passé inspire l'art contemporain
Date: December 22, 2025
Host: Xavier Mauduit
Guests:

• Aurélien Mauplot (artiste - Musée national de Préhistoire)
• Thibaut Lucas (artiste - Mémorial de Verdun)
• Florentine Lamarche-Ovise (artiste - Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature)

Episode Overview

This episode explores the profound relationship between the traces left by the past—whether prehistoric cave paintings or the scars of Verdun—and how these continue to inspire and inform contemporary art. Through conversations with artists whose work is rooted in direct engagement with archives, memorials, and museums, the episode examines how the act of “collecting traces” becomes a creative, emotional, and interpretive gesture, meditating on memory, sensibility, and our ongoing dialogue with history.

Key Discussions & Insights

1. The Trace as Artistic and Historical Material (00:09–03:30)

• The episode introduces "traces"—from prehistoric handprints to shell craters at Verdun—as material both for historians and artists.
• Aurélien Mauplot describes archives as "un réservoir de fiction potentielle" (02:30) and the artistic dialogue between contemporary creators and their millennia-old predecessors.

2. Artists and Their Immersive Engagements

a. Aurélien Mauplot: Grottoes and Prehistory (03:30–04:40, 19:32–22:44)

• He recounts a multi-year artistic residency across southern France, working intimately with prehistoric sites and museum collections.
• Describes his "immersion"—not only physically, but by living and even sleeping inside the Musée national de Préhistoire—culminating in performances like Gargas, a video work interacting with projected images of ancient negative handprints.
• On placing his own hand in these ancient stencils:

  "Je venais comme ça me mettre dans les mains, déposer ma main, comme créer une relation presque physique avec un individu... qui avait 20 000 ans." (22:44)

b. Thibaut Lucas: Verdun and the Artist's Legitimacy (04:40–08:41, 23:27–29:46)

• Lucas’ residency at Verdun began not strictly as an artistic project, but as a questioning of art’s place in the world, especially amidst contemporary violence:

  "Je me suis surtout posé la question de la légitimité de l'art face à tout ça." (04:40)

• He chronicled his "immersion" by spending nights in shell craters, experiencing the landscape’s reality and meditat​ing on the transformation of death into cycles of life and regrowth:

  "J'ai compris qu'en fait [les arbres] étaient les descendants des 80 000 morts qui sont encore sur le champ de bataille." (07:44)

• The focus of artistic attention narrows to micro-histories: individual holes, traces, objects—"l'artiste du mètre carré".
• Personal family connection: the death of an ancestor in a shell hole at Verdun shaped Lucas's entire project (27:51).

c. Florentine Lamarche-Ovise: Animality, Museums, and the Feminine (08:41–18:09; 32:15–35:40)

• Working at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Lamarche-Ovise explores traces of animals in art, myth, and museum collections, connecting contemporary installations to medieval and legendary bestiaries.
• Discusses her piece "Les pieds de la forêt" and the exhibition’s playful (but critical) engagement with themes like myth, gender (few women represented in collections), and the shifting human-animal boundary.
• On the museum’s "cabinet of curiosities" atmosphere:

  "En fait, moi, je me considère pas forcément comme un humain, mais plutôt comme un paysage à microcellules..." (09:00)

• She weaves in feminist perspectives by highlighting forgotten women’s roles, witch trials, and animal "trials":

  "Les femmes, elles étaient souvent sage-femmes, elles étaient herboristes…il y a aussi des sorciers...les animaux ont été au même degré que les femmes ou les hommes." (35:40)

3. The Unrepresentable, Emotion & Limits of Art

• Verdun and Prehistory both confront artists with the impossibility of fully translating trauma or distant time:

  "La disproportion, elle est gigantesque ... même eux [anciens combattants] n’arrivaient pas à parler, ils ne se sentaient pas compris." — Thibaut Lucas (23:27)

• Lucas finds solace in the modesty of focusing on what is near: the shell hole, the forest floor.
• The conversation repeatedly circles the tension between what is visible/documented and what eludes capture (emotion, physical experience, the “sensation” of being underground or amidst war).

4. How Objects Become Carriers of Memory or Meaning

• Museums organize, freeze, and sometimes sanitize traces: the uniform in a display case, the taxidermied animal, the curated object—contrasted with lived, smelly, or wild realities.
• Genevoix’s WWI account of wearing a uniform "pratiquement...nous n’en sommes sortis qu’au printemps de 1915" (46:57) is contrasted with the pristine object behind glass.
• The artists’ projects are attempts to re-animate these traces, to introduce new affective "layers," or as Mauplot says, to enact a palimpsest of histories.
• The poetic cycle ("l’herbe recouvre tout") and the act of collection become both process and metaphor.

5. Artistic Methods: Collection, Installation, and Recontextualization

• Mauplot instigates collaborative selection processes with museum staff to surface "invisible" objects—connecting personal stories to institutional narratives ("le musée sort de sa réserve", 53:39).
• Lucas assembles a cabinet of curiosities drawing not only from official artifacts but also mundane or contemporary trash (rotofil cables) as living traces.
• Lamarche-Ovise turns the museum into an immersive journey, activating both humor and critical distance (e.g., mapping modern public figures onto dogs in tapestry).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the bestiary of love:

  "C'est comme un fossile qu’on retrouverait et qu’on ne pourrait pas... L'association, ça fait des haïkus assez étranges, ce livre. Et du coup, on les a traduits en dessin à la gouache et à l’encre de chine..." — Florentine Lamarche-Ovise (12:27)

• On the poetic failure to "represent":

  "J’ai écouté pas mal d’archives...qui parlaient même d’irreprésentabilité de ce qu’ils ont vécu." — Thibaut Lucas (23:27)

• On perception in the cave:

  "Entrer dans une grotte, c’est accepter d’être aveugle, où l’œil devient un sens presque inutile..." — Aurélien Mauplot (41:05)

• On history’s plurality:

  "...c’est par la pluralité des démarches que l’on permet de saisir à un moment de l’histoire une histoire, et puis donner aussi le goût de l’histoire, l’envie d’aller plus loin." — Xavier Mauduit (53:39)

• On the cover of grass:

  "Il y a notamment un poème de Karl Sandburg qui a été écrit en 1918, qui s'appelle Grass, et qui dit : je suis l’herbe, je couvre tout. Et puis il gueule comme ça, laissez-moi travailler, je suis l’herbe, laissez-moi travailler." — Thibaut Lucas (56:02)

Important Timestamps

• 00:09 – Introduction to traces: caverns, shell holes, and the emotional charge of the past
• 02:30 – Aurélien Mauplot on archives as living material
• 04:40 – Thibaut Lucas questions the legitimacy and meaning of art at Verdun
• 07:44 – Lucas interprets trees at Verdun as descendants of fallen soldiers
• 19:32 – Mauplot recounts his immersive approach in caves and museums
• 23:27 – Lucas on the overwhelming weight of witnessing and representing history
• 29:46 – Artistic methods: the creation of the “blue inks” at Verdun
• 32:15 – Lamarche-Ovise on exhibition as physical, immersive storytelling
• 41:05 – Mauplot on blindness and sensory reversal in the cave
• 56:02 – Lucas on the echo between grass, life, and battlefield memory
• 53:39 – Collaborative curatorial methods: extracting seldom-seen objects from museum reserves

Tone & Language

• The episode is reflective, sometimes poetic, often intimate, with artists speaking candidly about doubt, process, and the limitations of their projects.
• Humor and playfulness appear, especially in Lamarche-Ovise’s approach, but always underpinned by a respect for the gravity of both historical trauma and the mysteries of prehistory.

Conclusion

This evocative episode is a journey through spaces where history, memory, and contemporary sensibility meet: war craters become cradles and graves; ancient handprints reach out to present hands; animal forms flicker between fable, trophy, and companion. Art here is not a solution but a gesture—often humble—towards understanding, connection, and remembrance.

Further Listening:
If you're intrigued by these discussions, visit the Musée national de Préhistoire (Dordogne), Mémorial de Verdun, or Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris). Each institution—through its curators, collections, and invited artists—acts as a living conduit for history’s enduring traces.

Next episode: The history of medieval music and troubadours.