Small Parisian museums are reinventing themselves to survive the pandemic

Reinventing themselves, seeking new sources of income and official aid have been the recipe for small Parisian museums to survive the semester when they were closed, like the rest of the cultural centers, due to government restrictions to stop the pandemic. .

The French capital has dozens of small, almost familiar museumsLike the Chocolate Museum, the Fan Museum or the Absinthe Museum, which have neither the financial power nor the possibility of obtaining sponsorship from companies such as large institutions, for example the Louvre or Pompidou, for survive this unprecedented situation.

One of these small spaces is the Oil lamp museum directed by Ara Kebapcioglu, a 71-year-old Armenian, who moved to Paris in 1982 after marrying a Frenchwoman and opened a small workshop of antique lamps in a small street in the V district.

In 2000, he decided to open a small exhibition of oil lamps in the back room of the workshop: a room of about fifteen square meters with around two hundred different models.

The influx into this space has never been very high, around three people a day, but since November it has not even been opened due to restrictions.

Kebapcioglu lives and pays the costs of the small museum with the sale of restored lamps and explains that, “surprisingly”, he has sold a lot more in recent months: “People cannot travel and the money they save they spend on redecorating their homes”he explained.

This lighting expert has joined Instagram and online sales, and ensures that the moment is “complicated” but that thanks to state aid, around 3,000 euros in two installments, he will be able to move forward.

LANGUAGES, FAIRS, MINERALS …

Another small museum that suffers from the punishment of restrictions is the Language museum, founded in 2013 by New Zealander Mark Oremland, who sold his travel agency in Paris to make his dream come true: to create a museum of languages ​​and linguistics.

In this small space, you can see a copy of the Rosetta Stone or one of the famous World War II Enigma encryption machines.

Antes de la pandemia solían ir unas diez personas al día, lo que le generaba in Oremland unas perdidas of 1,000 euros monthly, que equilibraba con los beneficios que le da un pequeño hostal that tiene en Nueva Zelanda y que atiende todos los veranos, cuando cierra the museum.

Since the closure, Oremland has started selling museum-related products online and has launched a fundraising campaign.

Although you continue to lose money and you don’t know when you can reopen, Oremland does not plan to close the premises: “It is the project of my life and I believe that one day we will benefit from it.”

But in Paris there are also larger museums, such as the one dedicated to the Arts of the Fair located in Bercy and founded by Jean Paul Favand in 1996, which is a complex of more than 8,000 square meters which brings together about twenty attractions. of the XIX and XX centuries as carousels, automatons and cabaret objects.

The elderly collector was able to legally reopen the museum between June and October 2020, but decided not to do so because with the capacity limited to a third of the capacity “he would have had more expenses than income.

So what have you been doing in the past fourteen months? “Innovate”, he answers bluntly. “I have invested more than one million euros by improving the attractions that we already have thanks to a State subsidy of several hundred thousand euros and to the support of the banks ”.

FINANCIAL PARADOX

Quite different is the case of the Mineralogy Museum, which is in fact an annex of the École des Mines de Paris, which exhibits 4,000 samples in a 1,000 m² room, in addition to the more than 100,000 that it has stored. .

And if the year 2020 closed it very far from the 20,000 annual visitors it had before, it was for them, “Financially, the best of recent years”, explained its director Didier Nectoux, who had more time to prepare and send information packs to certain patrons who made donations to the museum.

“Belonging to a public entity like the university puts us out of danger,” Nectoux acknowledged.

For the moment there is no official date for the reopening of the museums but last Thursday the president Emmanuel Macron held a meeting with the mayors to whom he assured that his intention is to reopen them in mid-May if the health situation allows it.

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