PROMESSE | Fondation Zinsou

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More than an exhibition, PROMESSE is a global project, the fruit of a multi-dimensional conversation and an intimate relationship between Joël Andrianomearisoa, the Zinsou Foundation, Benin, and the multiple voices that have nourished this dialogue over time.

“From Ouidah, Cotonou, the Zinsou Foundation, ourselves, we will promise ourselves worlds and wonders, grandiose, inevitable, magnificent things…”

Joël Andrianomearisoa invites the public to take a journey, a journey whose geography is invented and where time cannot be read on a watch. A journey that leads from Cotonou to Ouidah, from the center of the world to all elsewhere. A journey into memory, emotions, the melancholy of a season ending… A motionless journey in the movement of the works. A journey where solitude promises encounters, silence promises music, death promises life.

This exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the Zinsou Foundation and our first promise, the one that opens up all those to come: The promise to always dream together, to transform the world, to not be satisfied with anything but to always invent.

The promise, without ever obliging, symbolically commits. It carries within it a part of uncertainty, a fragile expectation that each work reveals in the journey that the artist draws from Cotonou to Ouidah. It is this interstice through which poetry enters the work: a moment suspended between what is and what could be, the expectation of an accomplishment that may never see the light of day. From promises then flow all emotions. From the land of Ouidah or in dreamed geographies, these promises take shape for the duration of an exhibition or forever.

The PROMESSE exhibition is structured around three distinct times and places.

PROMISE ME . The Lab . Cotonou

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

THE MUSEUM OF PROMISES . Jardin d’Essai. Ouidah

The PROMESSE exhibition is open

from December 7, 2024 to August 31, 2025

The Cotonou LAB is open

Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Ouidah Museum is open

Tuesday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and Wednesday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Jardin d’Essai will open its doors

January 12, 2025

Entrance and guided tour are free

Exceptional closure on December 24 and 25 / December 30, 31 and January 1

PROMISE ME. The Lab. Cotonou

The starting point of the journey is in Cotonou. The viewer enters the first installation through a unique voice, that of Clotilde Courau, an actress who embodies a first complicity with the artist, but also with Benin where she grew up. Immediately immersed in the promises that resonate on stage, the artist allows everyone to project themselves, from the beginning of the journey, into their own emotion that will make each visit a totally unique journey.

PROMISE ME. The Lab. Cotonou

Next come the Imaginary Cartographies, representations where borders fade away to make way for a world reinvented in a geography that refuses constraint. Each line carries within it the dream of elsewhere, the promise of another land.

PROMISE ME. The Lab. Cotonou

The line of the drawing precedes that of the writing. In a form dear to the artist, the garden is adorned with words, poems and invites us to continue the journey…
“Promises are starting points to go elsewhere”.

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

PROMISE . Museum . Ouidah

THE MUSEUM OF PROMISES. Jardin d’Essai. Ouidah

"The starting point of all these promises is nature."
It is around this garden that the first conversations will be born.
This garden, a true plant archive, preserves plants with thousand-year-old stories and infinite chapters. The land of Ouidah tells stories, on a rare time scale of several thousand years: those of climate change, those of the people who lived there, or those of the kingdoms that were masters. Each plant carries within it a unique story: citrus fruits have long carried within them the promise of deportation and death, on the contrary palm trees told of life, architecture, food, weaving..., or medicinal plants, which embody other stories of survival and transformation.
The land of the Jardin d’Essai can be read to understand what preceded us and it will give life, within it, to an extraordinary work:
The Museum of Promises
This building emerges from the land of Ouidah like a palimpsest. This very contemporary minimal architectural work, between building and sculpture, comes to bear witness to the present time to the layers of history that can be read in filigree in the plant archive that believes in it. The work becomes a true museum, with the protocol established by Joël Andrianomearisoa, who will invite other artists there as the seasons go by.

THE MUSEUM OF PROMISES. Jardin d’Essai. Ouidah

Architect, Joël Andrianomearisoa, has always been. Architect of dreams and emotion that he transmits in each text, each drawing, each mirror, each neon, each structure where the rigidity of the frame frees the forms and transcends poetry. Here he creates his first concrete architecture.
"The Museum of Promises is for me an architectural Manifesto, it is something that I want to experiment with today and that I want to replicate elsewhere, probably in Madagascar next. The question of architecture is important to me.
The question of a museum is also important. A museum represents the question of eternity, should we keep memories or forget them? Is the most important thing to keep History? I don't know. What do we do with memories? What do we do with History today? Do we promise to keep them? To get rid of them? This is a real topical issue today in Benin.
Ultimately, everything is possible in this museum of promises, it is a museum of all freedoms, of all possibilities in some way.

THE MUSEUM OF PROMISES. Jardin d’Essai. Ouidah

On the eve of the Zinsou Foundation’s 20th anniversary, the Musée des Promesses is a physical embodiment of the conversations and questions that we have always shared with Joël Andrianomearisoa. This work questions us on the role of the museum institution in the 21st century, on the continent and elsewhere. The Musée des Promesses is a space open to all, all the time. Its great openness to the world is embodied in its total absence of doors and visiting hours, abolishing all barriers with the public but creating new constraints of conservation and security. It defies all the established principles of a museum and yet it is as such that it projects itself towards the world. It forces us to question what we have learned. The work then pushes us to reflect on what we show according to the context; a completely open museum forces us to think about the work in its immediate environment, taking into account the climate, the heat, the humidity. In this, it opposes the White Cube, sanitized, with a controlled climate, defined by the Western world as a museum standard. It forces us to promise ourselves to invent our own standards, by looking at what surrounds us and taking into account our particularities. It is as much a question as an answer. It is a monument to dreams and to the future. It is the promise of the Foundation to artists, to its public, to the world…