For its Art and Material exhibition, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier offered its visitors a unique experience, with a gallery of sculptures that they were encouraged to touch.
Client: Musée Fabre
Production: Atelier WAM
Visitors could examine the artists’ methods, and remove the differences between sighted and unsighted.
The sense of touch was placed centre-stage – one of many challenges we were happy to take on. The visitor is plunged into darkness, depriving them of their usual visual cues. The shapes they usually see can only be re-envisaged through touch.
We were able to work, with great pleasure, with the masterpieces of Houdon, one of the greatest classical French sculptors – famously the Seated Voltaire.
The ten pieces of the exhibition are copies of the original works from the Museum’s own collection and from the Louvre. For this project we set up a production line of different processes: first scanning the original works in 3-D and then machining the masters. These were then moulded with marble or bronze resin. This allowed a faithful reproduction of the original and saved precious time in the development of the exhibition.
