Lille 2

This is the exhibition in the Musee de L'Hospice, that was just my kind of thing. Beautiful taxidermy animals, in a paper ark, in a lovely old building. The animals are from the Maison Deyrolle in Paris, which had a bad fire in 2008. It is somewhere I didn't know about for years, and have been to Paris quite often. Maybe I wasn't interested in taxidermy then. Anyway, it lost 90% of its collection which is so sad. The artist visited the gallery after the fire and drew an ark in the guest book, which, according to the description below signifies that those animals which escaped the flood were then caught by the fire. (They are all stuffed so it is academic really.) Some of the animals in this ark are from the gallery, and are scorched or quite badly burned. The thing I liked about it the most was how the animals were positioned, a giraffe lying down in amongst them all, a tiger facing into the boat, a snake curled around a piece of wood at the back, and two polar bears who look as if a private conversation has been interupted, and they are not happy about that.