Exhibit, that's to disturb harmony.
Exhibit, that's to trouble the visitor in his intellectual comfort.
Exhibit, that's to arouse emotions, anger, desire to know more.
Exhibit, that's to construct a specific discourse for the museum, made up of objects, texts and iconography.
Exhibit, that's to put the objects in the service of a theoretical subject, of a discourse or of a story and not the contrary.
Exhibit, that's to suggest the essential through critical distance, bearing a mark of humor, irony and derision.
Exhibit, that's to fight against the accepted ideas, the stereotypes and stupidity.
Exhibit, that's to intensively live a collective experience.

The MEN contributes to the growth of museums open to the everyday life. Widely recognized as innovative, stimulating, even provocative, its exhibitions propose to the visitors an original reflection about a set of themes tightly connected with the reality and put into perspective by the ethnological view, implicit and distant at the same time. These exhibitions bring in equally the here and the everywhere, the prestigious and the banal, the hand-made and the industrial, as well as many signs of a complex and culturally oriented reality.

In such a framework, the objects are not exposed for their own sake, but because they are inserted in a discourse, because they are becoming arguments of a history that is putting into perspective one or another of their characteristics, be they esthetic, functional or symbolic. Occasionally qualified as criticizing or destabilizing, such a process aims at allowing the visitors to put into perspective their perceptions, to deconstruct their knowledge and to question their certainties in order to bring them to think over their reality.

[Jacques Hainard et Marc-Olivier Gonseth]