The Minusubliminus project involves three partners: the town of Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire through the Musée de la Loire, the Loire et Nohain network of media libraries and the Collège René Cassin. The Musée de la Loire, which houses a remarkable collection of modern paintings and bears witness to the past activities of the Loire region, combines a range of disciplines including art, history and ethnology. Minusubliminus fits directly into this context, with an exhibition that questions the very nature of a museum structure, looking at how heritage objects are presented, how knowledge is disseminated and the ways in which they are interpreted.

All museums offer objects that are presented as worthy of interest, but they also and above all offer a precise and circumscribed discourse on reality, whether past or present. Reality and the representations we make of it are intimately intertwined, and any attempt at objectivity is often doomed to failure. This is all the more true in a museum setting, where the objects on display are as much of scientific interest as they are aesthetic or narrative. The surprising story of the Jesuit Gresset's parrot Ver-Vert, told at the museum, provided food for thought for the exhibition. Bred by the nuns of Nevers, Vert-Vert is a ‘devout’ parrot who speaks a polite and Christian language. Given as a gift by the nuns of Nevers to the nuns of Nantes, the parrot was entrusted to a Loire boatman to be transported to Nantes. The story goes that on the boat he learned the vocabulary of the sailors and arrived at port swearing like a carter, much to the annoyance of the nuns.
Isn't every museum a vehicle for legends, traditions, myths and ideologies ? This exhibition looks at how fact and fiction meet, whether in art, history, geography or the natural sciences.

In the first part, Aurélien Mole is invited to take a look at the permanent collections through the production of specific works, highlighting content, proposing an interpretation, a way of offering a particular rereading of this collection before the recoiling that will take place in 2012 [1]. Aurélien Mole wears many hats (artist, art critic, exhibition photographer, etc.), enabling him to transfer practices from one discipline to another. His work combines romanticism and pragmatism, magic and science. By staging found objects or works by other artists, ambiguous readings of these artefacts emerge, like so many stories to be interpreted. For the museum, it's a parallel story that it provokes, and an unexpected way of looking at things that it invites viewers to engage with.

In the temporary room, a group exhibition explores the issue in different directions. The Atlas Group explores the notion of archives, which are often used as signs of historical truth. Guillaume Bijl's work has a disruptive effect, blurring the usual codes of museums by presenting everyday objects. He transports us into a museum of the future. Marc Dion, for his part, takes a fairly critical look at the ways in which we value certain objects (coats of arms, trophies, stuffed animals, etc.), often forgetting the power games that are embodied in them, and which can be violent. Cristina Lucas is also interested in the power structures conveyed by collective memory, which are at odds with historical facts. Estefanía Peñafiel Loiaza poetically updates our reading grids in order to provide us with an enlightened view of certain aspects of reality, but also to distort it towards other interpretations. Julien Tiberi also explores the imaginary, creating scientific and artistic anachronisms. Finally, Bettina Samson highlights the aesthetics inherent in scientific practices, deliberately blurring the boundaries between artistic and scientific creation.