Sacred Places

The Sacred Places exhibition invites us to discover how the sacred is embodied today in Greater Paris and in all its diversity through multiple perspectives, between history, geography and sociology. Religious and non-religious places, places of memory, sacred in nature: the exhibition explores the multiple forms that the sacred takes today.

While the 80s and 90s heralded a new era for cities outside of religion and civic sacredness, the sacred seems to continue to make the city its home and would resist better than other types of spaces, even if it would be the object of contradictory tensions.

The city remains a melting pot of new forms of sacredness. The sacred as an urban function continues to profoundly mark the identities of the globalized Parisian metropolis, following modalities that enter into both continuity and rupture with the legacies of past centuries. Dozens of construction sites for sacred, religious or memorial buildings, restoration or construction, are open, especially in the outskirts of the metropolis which display, through their dynamism in this area, a form of rebalancing, in the face of the heritage density of the sacred in the urban center.

By browsing a frieze of historical documents, contemporary photographs, architectural plans and original large-format drawings, the exhibition Sacred Places - Building, Celebrating, Coexisting reminds us that the sacred, religious and non-religious, shapes neighborhoods and paths from Antiquity to the present day. It drives collective rites within the city, gives meaning to individual and collective actions and marks the places and times of the city.