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.