Reimaging Museum Memory

This study examines the bande dessinée (BD) Louvre project as a model of inclusive museum practice, exploring how the Louvre’s collaboration with comic artists redistributes the interpretive authority traditionally concentrated within canonical cultural institutions. Comics, long marginalized as a popular or subcultural form, gain institutional legitimacy as the Louvre formally invites practitioners of the ninth art into its spaces, collections, and curatorial discourse. Drawing on case studies from French, Belgian, Japanese, and Taiwanese artists, this study argues that the BD Louvre project enacts two forms of inclusion: the legitimization of comics as a serious artistic and curatorial medium, and the facilitation of cross-cultural dialogue across diverse comics traditions and readerships. Using Hans Belting’s image–medium–body framework as an analytical tool, the study examines how artists reimagine the Louvre’s iconic works through culturally specific visual languages and book materialities, transforming museum memory into a dynamic, portable experience that extends beyond the physical galleries and into readers’ everyday spaces and imaginations. The BD Louvre project thus emerges not merely as a publishing initiative, but as an inclusive mediation strategy that opens the museum’s memory to broader artistic and cultural participation.