🗓️When: Friday 18 September, 3–4pm
📍Where: 407 Babel Building, University of Melbourne
“‘Trésors de la Nation ?’ Tracing Pacific Objects from the Bougainville Expedition to Revolutionary French Public Museums”
This seminar examines the role of early public museums in the construction of a French national identity after the Revolution, arguing that “Frenchness” was shaped through transnational material practices as much as through political ideology. Focusing on Pacific objects associated with Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s circumnavigation (1766-1769), I will trace their circulation through royal cabinets, early museums and twentieth-century institutions. Pawns in a program of nationalisation during the Revolution, these objects helped define a French identity through systems of comparison, othering and imperial expansion. Situating these histories within contemporary museum debates on universalism, inalienabilité and restitution, this talk will plot the ways in which these Pacific objects were absorbed into a French patrimoine.
Heidi Bula is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, completing her doctorate in French Studies and Art History under the supervision of Véronique Duché and Anne Dunlop. Her thesis maps the early French collection of Pasifika cultural materials during the late eighteenth-century, examining the contexts in which these ethnographic objects were collected and how they were received in Europe. She is a Graduate Research Academic Associate in the Art History and Curatorship program, and has taught across several departments, including European Studies, French Language, and Art History. She has two articles forthcoming, with Brill and with the Australian Journal of French Studies. Before starting her PhD, she worked at the Picasso Museum in Antibes and the Mougins Museum of Classical Art as both a documentalist and education officer.