Frédéric Jousset loves physical prowess. The sale, in 2023, of Webhelp, the call center operator co-founded in 2000, propelled it into the very closed circle of French billionaires. The entrepreneur also has a taste for excess: he had the largest catamaran in the world built, 47 meters long, for the tidy sum of 41 million euros. A rich man’s whim? Not really. The businessman will not have the free enjoyment of it.
Because this superlative sailboat aims to host a traveling art festival eight months a year, organized by the foundation it created in 2019, Art Explora, to connect twenty ports in fifteen Mediterranean countries. This three-year journey is due to start in March in Malta, continue in April in Venice to coincide with the art biennale, before culminating in June in Marseille. “A way of mixing practices and crossing borders”, decrees the businessman experienced in punchlines. And to promise « innovative, hybrid and unexpected meetings »and above all free, to attract those who do not set foot in a museum or a theater. « There is a fascination with the boats we see in major sailing races, but, until now, people could only see them without getting into them”continues Frédéric Jousset, who is banking on the “wow effect” of a catamaran capable of accommodating 2,000 people per day.
The principle of a wandering museum is not new. Inspired by bookmobiles, traveling media libraries, entrepreneur Ingrid Brochard launched MuMo in 2011. This truck, redesigned in 2017 by designer Matali Crasset, travels the roads to present works from public collections at the foot of buildings in outlying neighborhoods and in rural areas to a public that is far from them. “Our strength is the territorial network”welcomes Ingrid Brochard, recalling that 55% of its users have never entered a museum.
A “village” of 3,000 square meters
Beaubourg, for its part, had tried the mobile Pompidou Center in 2011, a laudable initiative which, however, stopped after two years due to lack of money. The Parisian establishment has relaunched the project by partnering with MuMo to circulate its collections in mainland France (and soon overseas), in a second trailer financed to the tune of 600,000 euros by Art Explora. A “mobile cinema” project, a new fleet of trucks aimed at strengthening children’s image education, should also see the light of day in a year.
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