The latest show at the MEN (Ethnographic Museum of Neuchatel) echoes the one featured by the Museum of Natural History from 2020 to 2022. Focusing for a second time on the notion of “wild”, this show takes up the notion from the angle of the human sciences.

By qualifying the wild as impossible right from the start, the MEN's proposition lays emphasis on the ambiguous character of this notion... a notion that varies depending on the speaker, the context, cultural fantasies and, too, the social values of the day as well as the viewers' personal leanings.

For an ethnographic museum, the subject touches upon its very foundations, entailing as it does the different ways for thinking about otherness and, too, the great myths that would pit the good savages against the bad ones. It also has viewers question the persistence of such representations to this day. Although a growing part of today's population sees “progress” as worrisome, the wildness is undergoing a significant makeover. Losing its role as a deterrent, it now appears as the incarnation of various alternatives to all the evils befalling Western societies.

L’impossible sauvage invites viewers to an exploration of this new topography. The visit begins with a trip across an oppressive city, as an allegory of a domestication in which nonetheless the “wild” never fails to resurface. It goes on to describe a marvelous forest harboring three imaginary scenarios: the enduring idealization of “native peoples” and of their frugality, the hope of communing with a good-willed Nature, and the desire to rediscover the bestiality hidden under layers of modern codes. The following stage features a tangle of branches where each of these projects discloses its limits and contradictions, as if to remind us that the urge to cultivate the wild ends up altering its very character.

The last scene sketches out a utopian site encompassing an industrial wasteland, a zone to be protected and a field of ruins. Various social and artistic experiments serve to muddle the distinction between wild and domestic and, as such, present the emergence of new equilibriums and heretofore untested manners of inhabiting the world.