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.
Read more about this topic: Maison D'Ailleurs
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)