.

Memento vivere is a prospective research, which will become public in the spring of 2025 in a form hybridizing contemporary creation and research in social sciences. It continues our previous work on the living and vitalities, from a new angle. Because art remains a powerful tool to reframe our lives, to situate them in their right measure in the long time of humanization and the great cycle of the living.

It can help us in particular to admit how much the generations gone by compose our matrix, how much we still lead our lives, accompanied by their words and with their tools. This is how they socialize us and humanize us. No civilization would exist without this transmission of words and knowledge, symbols and tools.

There is nothing necrophiliac in this research but, at the time of the Anthropocene and the collapse of ecosystem balances, the desire to question and reframe our lives, to situate them in their proper measure in the long time of humanization and in the tangled dynamics of the living.

• Two contemporary works will be inaugurated on Thursday, November 6, 2025, at the Petit Sablon cemetery in the commune of La Tronche

• and a series of encounters will take place at the Grenoble museum on Saturday, November 8.

> Opus 01 : Les Présences

The first public production will take place near the two mass graves of the Petit-Sablon cemetery, in the commune of La Tronche, which welcome anonymous people, the destitute, those without known families and irreducible personalities who chose to be buried here out of pure conviction, thus defying the social order for eternity. It will be called Les Présences.

Philippe Mouillon takes up the vocabulary of photographic portraits reproduced on porcelain, present in many cemeteries, where they bear witness to the social and family order of other eras. We thus leaf through an entire social ecosystem, a mille-feuille of extinguished presences that obviously affect us. Because despite the alignments, an apparently immutable order, cemeteries are places of disorder, emotional disorder of course, but even more abysmal rout in the face of the evidence of our insignificance. At work everywhere and for everyone, wealthy or destitute, the irresistible silent dissolution of what was once a life in the impalpable.

In a few decades, these portraits become so eroded by the cycles of bad weather and the corrosive power of the sun’s rays that they become illegible. They seem erased by the excess of light or eaten away by humidity and micro-organisms. The chemical texture decomposes into an exhausted, sometimes absurd or extravagant colorization. Individualities thus dissolve and slowly fade away, which is all the more disturbing since the photograph obviously attests that this existence was nevertheless lived, with its ordinary daily life of joys and sorrows, its passions and its dramas. But by dissolving, these images no longer preserve the trace of a singular existence but nevertheless bear witness to a presence.

It is this anonymity of individualities dissolved in a common humanity that will be amplified here, in a vast book of porcelains that will detach us from the continuum of daily life to evoke a deeper present where presences survive.

> Opus 02 : La Moire

Mathilde Béguin is a visual artist, landscape architect, and trainer. She graduated from the Boulle school. Her brother Nicolas Béguin is a designer, visual artist, and architecture teacher, and graduated from the Chartres school. Their research combines art, design, and raw earth architecture, and they propose a space for reception and meditation made from compressed charcoal for the memento vivere cycle. Like a relic from the distant past of humanity, at the time of the first fires dominating the night and then leaving the circular imprint of the hearth after combustion, this black form absorbs the light and inspires an instinctive form of respect. It will also take its place in the Petit-Sablon cemetery, in the commune of La Tronche, which is hosting this first year of the cycle. It will be presented to the public in November 2025.

> Conversations: at the Grenoble Museum

To mark this initiative, we are offering a series of conversations on Saturday, November 8, on the place of the dead in the world of the living. These conversations will bring together artists—whose work questions our mortal condition—and practitioners who are confronted daily with death or its accompaniment:

Albertine Delanpe, author of La cendre de tes morts (Éditions La dernière lettre)
Rachid Koraichi, visual artist, author of Jardin d’Afrique in Zarzis, Tunisia, a cemetery for the anonymous bodies of migrants who died at sea.
Julia Champey, anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, head of the Grenoble branch of the Medical Humanities Chair at the GHU Psychiatry-Neurosciences / Sorbonne, directed by Cynthia Fleury,
Pierre Reboul, writer, author of Haiku du seuil de Death and Petites chroniques d’un carré commun, a member of the collective Morts de rue et personnesisoleres de Grenoble, to accompany the funerals in the Carré commun of the homeless and disaffiliated,
Pascaline Thiolliere, architect, researcher on spaces of coexistence between the dead and the city, at the Cresson laboratory, ENSA Grenoble-UGA.
Daniel Bougnoux, philosopher,
Jacques Grison, photographer, author of a long-term research project on the landscapes of Verdun,
Mathilde and Nicolas Béguin, architect and visual artist,
Philippe Mouillon, visual artist, initiator of memento vivere.

The Grenoble Museum thus revives a long tradition of art history, to which its collections bear witness, from Egyptian antiquities to the present day.

With the support of the Ministry of Culture (Drac Auvergne Rhône-Alpes), the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region – within the framework of the 21st Century Memories calls for projects, the Department of Isère, the City of La Tronche