Exhibition opens at Lyon Confluences Museum
Starting from Friday, October 16, the Lyon Confluences Museum is dedicating a new exhibition titled Animal culte, which will be available to visit until August 15, 2027. The exhibition explores the relationship between humans and animals in different cultures, featuring over 330 ethnographic objects and specimens of natural history across 1,000 square meters.Exhibition highlights human-animal relationships
According to Hélène Lafont-Couturier, director of the Confluences Museum, each item highlights "the importance of animals in our lives" and allows for a closer examination of the paradoxes of human behavior towards them. Several species are represented and classified by theme, depending on whether they are sacred, exploited, hunted or used to convey a political message.Symbolic and controversial displays
In the room dedicated to the symbolic perception of animals, relics of sacrifice face a 19th-century Vietnamese offering drum intended to "substitute a live animal to avoid its suffering," explains Mathilde Gallay-Keller, project head of the exhibition. Despite this evidence of sensitivity to the animal cause, the livestock activities mentioned later testify to an acceleration of intensive exploitation, illustrated notably by a cattle branding iron and a crimson Chinese silk tunic.Art and politics in the exhibition
On the wall of the following space, named "wild," a zebra's rear is displayed as a hunting trophy. A fake made in 2016 by a French artist "to question the public about these hunting practices and particularly the safari," says Ms. Gallay-Keller. Naturalist books, furs, cages and stuffed hawks give way to a more political area: there are side by side panels from the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, where mice, pigs and cats represent Jews, Poles and Nazis during World War II, and a painting by artist Philippe Rousseau where rats serve through anthropomorphism to criticize the clergy.Exhibition concludes with a hopeful outlook
The exhibition ends with a chronological timeline of the animal cause, illustrating a progressive movement, driven notably by animal rights activists in the 1960s who wanted to "stop all use and exploitation of animals," details the exhibition head. On an optimistic note, the last room invites reflection on a better coexistence of the human species and animals whose natural environments are shrinking. Nearly 350,000 visitors had attended the previous exhibition named Zombis, aux origines, presented from last October to August 2026.
