One exhibition, one day each month, thirty minutes, one gesture from the Loire!
This year, the museum's activities will give a voice to the "gestures of the Loire" and put people back at the heart of the river. Month after month, we'll be shining the spotlight on a singular verb, and therefore an action, its actor and its tools... This month we'll be NAVIGUERing our way up the river in front of this Nevers earthenware salad bowl decorated with barges on a train, dating from 1800.
Incredible, paradoxical even... what has the "train", the commonly accepted gravedigger of the Loire navy, got to do with it? What's the point of sailing like this by train? Here again, necessity dictates law, there is strength in numbers, especially when sailing, when you have to pass under bridges and when the enemy to be fought is reputed to be tough: the current!
Any sailor worthy of his rank will also have to tame the 'blunder', or 'gaffe' - and not make one! The river people certainly know how to use humour, and have named these tools after them! Is it an original way of standing out, of asserting loud and clear the difference that makes them truly Lords of the water?
The mastery of these very specific manoeuvres: navigation in train, halyards on the fly..., the use of these mysterious tools for the neophyte: blunders, blunders... will no longer hold any secrets for you. The veil will finally be lifted on these gestures that can't be learnt from a manual, which can only be reproduced from generation to generation through transmission and experience.
The Musée de la Loire invites you to take a little cultural and historical lunchtime break, before or after your sandwich, your plate, to digest or whet your appetite... join us as we plunge into the heart of the indefectible links that have united and still unite Man and the river!
