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Biomedicine in museums

Mediation and immediacy: Displaying nano surfaces in a space of stone surfaces

The old réfectoire at the Les Cordeliers campus of University of Paris 6 has been used for a variety of activities in the last centuries—housing, among other tings, a print shop for Banque de France, the workshop of the painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and Guillaume Dupuytren’s museum of pathological anatomy (between 1835 and 1939). Now owned by the City of Paris the réfectoire building has been transformed into an information center for science and culture.

Between 10 April and 10 May they are showing the Italian photographer Lucia Covi’s exhibition ‘Blow-up: images du nanomonde’ (for a review of the show in Italy in 2006, see here):

Set in an ordinary exhibition room these pictures would have looked much more ordinary. But the huge room is an excellent sensuous contrast to the images of the invisible world at the nanoscale. The old, raw and tactile stone walls provide a fitting frame of immediacy and presence for the visitor’s visually mediated experience of the raw and non-tactile nanosurfaces:

And, finally, one of the blow-ups:

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

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