Last updated The Maison d'Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains
The Maison d'Ailleurs (translated as "House of Elsewhere") is a museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland). It is a non-profit foundation functioning both as a public museum and a specialized research center.
The archives of the museum contain around 70,000 documents related to science fiction or utopia (books, art pieces, toys, etc.), including some very old (as early as the sixteenth century) or unique pieces. The collections of the museum are used for iconographic purposes or research (literature, history of ideas, design, etc.). The Maison d'Ailleurs thus represents an important research and documentation center.
In parallel, the museum presents from two to three temporary exhibitions per year, around the main themes of science fiction (cities of the future, space travel, lost worlds, etc.) and its artists: H. R. Giger, John Howe, James Gurney, Caza, Jean Fontaine, etc.. The exhibitions favour diversity and openness towards the world, in order to reach a broad audience. The museum also offers itinerary exhibitions and regularly presents its work in Switzerland and abroad. Half a dozen exhibitions are rented per year on average.
The Maison d'Ailleurs is the only public institution of its kind in the world. It has the status of a non-profit foundation, and therefore isn't directly a communal museum. The Foundation manages the collections owned by the city of Yverdon-les-Bains in the building it has been provided with. Five to seven members of the Foundation board are chosen by the municipality of Yverdon-les-Bains, while two others come from the association Amis de la Maison d'Ailleurs (Friends of the House of Elsewhere).
History
The Maison d'Ailleurs originates from the work of the French encyclopedian Pierre Versins, who dedicated his life to writing and the study of what he named "rational romanesque conjectures" ("conjectures romanesques rationnelles" in French). For more than twenty years, he gathered a very important collection of science fiction works. Based on this corpus, he wrote one of the major books in this domain, the Encyclopédie de l'utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction. In 1976, he donated his assets to the city of Yverdon-les-Bains and the Maison d'Ailleurs was created. Pierre Versins acts as its curator until he moves back to France in 1981. Initially, the Maison d'Ailleurs only occupies a three-room flat, and doesn't have the ambition of a museum.
After a lethargy period (during which the direction is held by Pascal Ducommun), the municipality of Yverdon-les-Bains decides in 1989 to install the Maison d'Ailleurs in the renovated old prison, a historical building built in 1806 and well-situated in the center of the city. The journalist Roger Gaillard (1947–2010) is chosen as its curator and the new museum opens in 1991.
By the end of 1995, the communal council of Yverdon decided to cut more than 70% of the budget for the next year, which dramatically reduced the organizational slack of the Maison d'Ailleurs and generated a lot of negative reactions. The majority of the staff was dismissed. In 1998, a foundation is created to manage the museum. Its first decision is to give the direction to historian Patrick Gyger, who takes over in February 1999.
Espace Jules Verne
The Jules Verne Exhibition Space
In 2003, collector Jean-Michel Margot decided to donate one of the most important collections dedicated to Jules Verne to the city of Yverdon-les-Bains. The Maison d'Ailleurs was given the task to manage and present this collection.
This Jules Verne collection contains about 20,000 documents, including rare pieces such as posters dating from the end of the nineteenth century, hand-written notes, ancient iconography linked to discovery and scientific adventure, as well as the complete collection of the Voyages Extraordinaires, owned by the granddaughter of Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Jules Verne's publisher.
To host these pieces, a new Espace Jules Verne (Jules Verne Exhibition Space) has been built in the old casino of Yverdon-les-Bains. In addition to the public presentation of the collection, a workspace is reserved to researchers, with a privileged access to documents. The Espace Jules Verne is connected to the rest of the museum by a footbridge.
The administration of the museum and a large collection of pulp magazines have also been moved to the new building. This will allow the creation of a permanent exhibition at the Maison d'Ailleurs, in addition to the temporary exhibitions.
The Espace Jules Verne opened in October 2008.
Partnerships
The Maison d'Ailleurs represents an ever-expanding research and documentation center, which has built a large network of partners over time. The museum collaborates with the European Space Agency (ESA), the University of Lausanne, the Cité de l'Espace in Toulouse (France), the International Trade Event in Bordeaux, the "Utopiales" festival in Nantes (France), the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival, and it is part of the Science et Cité network in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.
Among its studies, the Maison d'Ailleurs has coordinated an important research funded by the ESA to try to find, in science fiction works, imaginary inventions related to astronautics and space conquest technologies.
In a partnership with the ESA and the Agence Martienne (Martian Agency), the Maison d'Ailleurs has realised the most important science fiction image library in the world. The museum has also been mandated by Pro Helvetia to prepare an important itinerary exhibition project about Swiss artists working in cinema and video games.
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).
The Voyages extraordinaires is a sequence of fifty-four novels by the French writer Jules Verne, originally published between 1863 and 1905.
Yverdon-les-Bains is a municipality in the district of Jura-Nord vaudois of the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. It is the seat of the district. The population of Yverdon-les-Bains, as of December 2018, was 30,157.
Pierre Versins was a French Science Fiction collector and scholar. From 1957-62, he published a critical fanzine, Ailleurs. He published four science fiction novels between 1951 and 1971, including En avant, Mars, Les etoiles ne s'en foutent pas, Leprofesseur, and Les transhumains. His ex-wife, Martine Thome, is credited on the short story "Ceux d'Argos". Versins always specified that Thome's name appears on this particular short story because it was initially her idea, yet written entirely by Versins himself, in his personal style. Versins published Encyclopedie de Utopie et de la sf, which won a special award at Torcon II, the 1973 Worldcon and he won a Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association in 1991. In 1975, he founded the Maison d'Ailleurs, a museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journey in Yverdon-les-Bains, (Switzerland). During World War II, Versins was incarcerated in Auschwitz.
Facing the Flag or For the Flag is an 1896 patriotic novel by Jules Verne. The book is part of the Voyages extraordinaires series.
Patrick J. Gyger is a Swiss historian and writer. In the 1990s he specialised in medieval studies and in 1998 published the book, L'Épée Et La Corde: Criminalité Et Justice À Fribourg (1475-1505) on the topic of crime and justice. One of Gyger's publications is the history of the flying car, with Les voitures volantes, Souvenirs d'un futur rêvé, published in English as Flying Cars: The Extraordinary History of Cars Designed for Tomorrow's World. From 1999 to 2010, he was the director of Maison d'Ailleurs, museum of utopia in Switzerland. In late 2010, Gyger was appointed as the director of Le Lieu unique, French national cultural center in Nantes. In 2014, the Swiss Federal Council appointed him Honorary Consul of Switzerland in Nantes.
With the growth of science fiction studies as an academic discipline as well as a popular media genre, a number of libraries, museums, archives, and special collections have been established to collect and organize works of scholarly and historical value in the field.
A Floating City, or sometimes translated The Floating City, is an adventure novel by French writer Jules Verne first published in 1871 in France. At the time of its publication, the novel enjoyed a similar level of popularity as Around the World in Eighty Days. The first UK and US editions of the novel appeared in 1874. Jules Férat provided the original illustrations for the novel.
The Laténium is an archeology museum located in Hauterive, a suburb of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Its name refers to the famous nearby site of La Tène which gave its name to the Second European Iron age. The Laténium is composed of a 2,500 m2 (27,000 sq ft) park and a museum building which also harbours the archaeological section of the Heritage Offices of the State of Neuchâtel, as well as the chair of prehistory of the University of Neuchâtel. The museum and its park are built on what used to be three archaeological sites that were excavated during the construction of the A5 motorway. Theses sites date from the Upper Paleolithic, Bronze Age and Neolithic. The park features dolmens and glacial erratics, reconstitutions of prehistoric and antique devices, and modern works of art. The museum displays the Bevaix boat, a 20 m (66 ft) Gallo-Roman ship found in Bevaix. Items from periods comprised between the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages are on display, including the remains of a Magdalenian hunting camp.
Édouard Riou was a French illustrator who illustrated six novels by Jules Verne, as well as several other well-known works.
The Village in the Treetops is a 1901 novel by Jules Verne. The book, one of Verne's "Voyages Extraordinaires", is his take on Darwinism and human development.
The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, formerly known as the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature, is "the largest publicly accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian and dystopian literature in the world". It is housed in Special Collections and Archives of the UCR Libraries at the University of California, Riverside. It consists of more than 300,000 items, including hardcover and paperback books, SF fanzines, film and visual material, and comic books, including manga and anime, as well as a variety of archival materials.
George Roux (1853–1929) was a French artist and book illustrator. His best-known works today are a large number of illustrations he created for the science-fiction novels of Jules Verne, in the series Les voyages extraordinaires. He was the second-most prolific illustrator of Verne's novels, after Léon Benett, drawing the illustrations for 22 novels in the original editions of Verne's works with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The first of them was L’Épave du Cynthia and the last was L'Étonnante aventure de la mission Barsac.
French science fiction is a substantial genre of French literature. It remains an active and productive genre which has evolved in conjunction with anglophone science fiction and other French and international literature.
Joëlle Morosoli is a French-Canadian sculptor of French and Swiss descent. Her work takes the form either of installations or of architecturally integrated art in public buildings. Most of her works have moving parts, driven by mechanical systems.
Journey Through the Impossible is an 1882 fantasy play written by Jules Verne, with the collaboration of Adolphe d'Ennery. A stage spectacular in the féerie tradition, the play follows the adventures of a young man who, with the help of a magic potion and a varied assortment of friends and advisers, makes impossible voyages to the center of the Earth, the bottom of the sea, and a distant planet. The play is deeply influenced by Verne's own Voyages Extraordinaires series and includes characters and themes from some of his most famous novels, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon.
Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. Most famous for his novel sequence, the Voyages Extraordinaires, Verne also wrote assorted short stories, plays, miscellaneous novels, essays, and poetry. His works are notable for their profound influence on science fiction and on surrealism, their innovative use of modernist literary techniques such as self-reflexivity, and their complex combination of positivist and romantic ideologies.
"A Winter amid the Ice" is an 1855 short adventure story by Jules Verne.
Jules Verne (1828–1905), the French writer best known for his Voyages extraordinaires series, has had a wide influence in both scientific and literary fields.
Video games in Switzerland have been released since the 1980s. In 2016, there were between 100 and 120 game companies, mostly small, corresponding to about 500 employees and a turnover of about 50 millions Swiss francs.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
