The Mobile Museum

Interview with the founder

Why did you create MuMo?

Ingrid Brochard: "I conceived the project when I was 33. I'd just sold my company and had just returned from a 3-month crossing of Antarctica on a scientific ship between the ice floes and the silence. I wanted to be useful, to make art accessible to children, something I had missed so much as a child in my native province. And I said to myself: how can we bring art to them? I remembered the bookmobile I'd waited for impatiently as a child. I remembered the Klaxon of the travelling grocery store that passed through my grandmother's village in the Cher region, and the travelling cinema. That's how the idea for MuMo was born. Since 2011, the MuMo has visited 250,000 visitors, first in France - from Saint Venant in Pas-de-Calais to the outskirts of Marseille - then in Africa, in Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon.

We thought the adventure would last a few years. The MuMo has been running 6 days out of 7 and 50 weeks a year... for over 10 years. Today, we are supported by the government, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education, numerous NGOs and local authorities. MuMo's strength lies in bringing all these players together around this unifying project, and in having succeeded in creating a territorial network that makes it possible, literally and figuratively, to bring art into the public arena. In this way, art travels to become accessible to everyone, whatever their geographical, social or economic situation.

At each stop, an extraordinary encounter is created with children who discover the works - 50% of them have never been to a museum - then create their own, before showing the exhibition to their parents, grandparents, neighbors and local shopkeepers. This is the magic of the MuMo: to awaken the eyes of thousands of children and adults in a direct face-to-face encounter with art, to bring together residents for whom art is an unsuspected meeting point, to create links, loosen tongues and make life more beautiful."