Exploring Migration and Return at the MUCEM
Image from the Revenir exhibition, at MUCEM 08 October 2024 - 16 March 2025.
Image from the Revenir exhibition, at MUCEM 08 October 2024 - 16 March 2025.
The Mediterranean Core Art Program went on a field study to Marseille this past weekend in order to visit the MUCEM’s latest exhibition entitled Revenir. The exhibit highlighted the ways in which people can be suspended between countries across the Mediterranean and more specifically, the desire and/or inability to return to one’s homeland. The exhibition wove together objects, photographs, personal testimonies, and contemporary artworks, all reflecting the deeply personal yet universal nature of migration. Some returns are annual traditions, summer visits where nostalgia meets the reality of change. Others are final homecomings, where years of exile culminate in a permanent resettlement. But for many, return is an unfulfilled want, repressed by closed borders or lost homes.
One of the most striking aspects of the exhibition was its ability to layer the personal with the political. Family photographs and everyday objects such as letters, jewelry, and pieces of fabric were displayed alongside cartographic studies tracing migration paths across the Mediterranean. The maps visualized not just movement but the emotional weight of return, showing how migration is rarely simple. Some stories in the exhibition spoke of returns that felt like reunions, while others described the pain of finding a homeland that had become unrecognizable. Beyond individual narratives, Revenir raised broader questions about identity, belonging, and the way memory shapes the concept of home. The exhibit revealed how returning is not always a physical journey but sometimes an act of remembrance. This theme was particularly resonant in the contemporary artworks on display, many of which explored the fluid and fragmented nature of home. Multimedia installations blended video, photography, and sound to capture the dissonance of displacement.
After leaving MUCEM, the group walked up through the 1st arrondissement of Marseille, a district shaped by the same migrations explored in the exhibition. The streets carried themes of displacement and reinvention throughout the North African grocery stores, Armenian bakeries, and Greek cafes standing as quiet markers of histories of movement and adaptation. The walk through this neighborhood reflected part of the exhibition’s message, that the wish to return can cause migrants to recreate their homes elsewhere.
