The Arab World Institute (Institut du monde arabe), the Margency Children's Hospital (HEM) of the French Red Cross and visual artist Caroline Desnoëttes have joined forces to create the cultural and artistic project NOMADE. The project received financial support from the association Sur un Lit de Couleurs and the Dassault Group.
After several months of creative work and four stopovers at the Arab World Institute, 70 young patients from the Margency Children's Hospital are presenting their palanquins, made from wheelchairs and expired medical supplies. Set in the heart of the museum, facing the display cases devoted to nomadism, these works evoke the journeys these budding artists make through their care pathways.
With thanks to:“NOMADE: a fruitful dialogue between the IMA's collections and the care pathways at the HEM, or how to make the wheelchair, that mobile support and extension of the body, a thing of beauty. While visiting the IMA's collections, my eye was drawn to the wooden frame of a palanquin used by nomadic travellers on the back of a dromedary. Reading the label on nomadism, I saw a connection with the lives of the young patients at the Margency Children's Hospital. This cross-reading revealed how obviously nomadic life at the HEM is: mobility requires suitable equipment, both sturdy and light, as the gear of today's nomadic patients shows. With their wheelchairs, young people can master the vast desert expanses of illness where no settled person dares to venture. The careful ornamentation of these objects shows the importance given to their aesthetic, symbolic and identity functions. To face this desert, supplies of water, food and care are essential, but cultural and spiritual baggage matters just as much. This is the idea behind the refined decoration of these rolling nomadic vehicles, meant to protect young travellers from losing their way, in every sense of the word.
Within the word NOMADE lies MONDE, the French word for “world”. At the HEM, which welcomes patients from all over the world for post-transplant, oncology and specialised paediatric care, life journeys and care pathways are nomadic. Young people often arrive at the hospital in a wheelchair or on a stretcher, adapting to the new forms of mobility that illness imposes. Just as dromedaries and camels are essential for getting around a hostile land, the wheelchair makes it possible to travel across the vast territory of illness. At the HEM, our dromedaries are wheelchairs! We have turned them into rolling palanquins using expired medical supplies, creating works that stand as true manifestos for creative, individual mobility, with a commitment to sustainable and human development.”
Caroline Desnoëttes