News

IPS 2024 in Berlin

Universcience is proud to have participated in the International Planetarium Society (IPS) 2024 biannual conference held in Berlin from July 18 to 25!

From July 18 to 20, Christelle Barclay, Head of Audiovisual Production Projects at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie Planetarium, attended the Fulldome Festival at the Zeiss-Planetarium Jena, showcasing immersive digital artworks. From July 21, she joined discussions at the IPS 2024 conference, held under the domes of the Stiftung Planetarium Berlin.

On July 24, Christelle delivered a compelling talk on "How could digital artworks in planetariums diversify our networks and audience?" She explored how digital arts enhance our mission of popularizing science and attract new visitors, while addressing the challenges and opportunities of merging audiences in an increasingly competitive immersive environment.

Congratulations to Christelle for her inspiring presentation and a big thank you to all the participants for these enriching exchanges!

Explore our planetarium film offerings.

AMCSTI 2024

From 11 to 14 June 2024, the Universcience teams were in Montbéliard, France, for the annual AMCSTI congress.

Their programme was full, with a presentation of the working groups on inclusion, a round table with the Cité des métiers, a workshop on mediation and industry, another workshop on CSR and inclusion, a mini-conference on our travelling exhibition Cancers and its audience studies, and finally a round table with blob. 

Our export team also presented our travelling exhibitions at the Foire aux projets.

Cold in Croissy-sur-Seine

Our travelling exhibition Cold is in Croissy-sur-Seine, France, at the Château Chanorier until 28 July 2024. This summer, come and cool off and learn more about the mysteries of cold in all its forms, both natural and artificial. Through three themes - life, science and society - you'll discover the mechanisms and uses of cold, as well as its impact on our daily lives.

Banquet in Montreal

The Montréal Science Centre is hosting our travelling exhibition, Banquet, for its first North American tour, until 16 March 2025. It was produced by the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie in partnership with INRAE and adapted by the Montreal Science Centre.

The exhibition was inaugurated in the presence of Cybèle Robichaud, Director of the Montreal Science Centre, and Bruno Maquart, President of Universcience, by videoconference, both of whom were delighted with this great international partnership!

A special event in the presence of the chefs with whom the Science Centre collaborated to adapt the exhibition with local content: Paul Toussaint, Colombe St-Pierre, Laprise Normand, Marie-Cecile Nottaway and Charles-Antoine Crête.

The exhibition appeals to the senses, the mind and the sweet tooth. It highlights the many pleasures of gastronomy: the pleasure of creating, the pleasure of tasting and the pleasure of sharing. Hedonistic and erudite, it offers a sensory and convivial visitor experience around a unifying and joyful subject.

Science and culture come together in the many aspects of gastronomy.

Cats & Dogs in Marseille

The traveling exhibition Cats & Dogs opened this weekend at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de la Ville de Marseille. It will be on display until January 5, 2025. Aurélie Biancarelli, Deputy Mayor of Marseille, responsible for higher education, student life and research, attended the inauguration alongside Anne Médard, Director of the Marseille Natural History Museum, and Fatima Ouali, Project Manager at Universcience. In their speeches, Aurélie Biancarelli and Anne Médard both praised the excellence of the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie's design and production, and emphasized their delight at the collaboration between the two institutions. This is part of the City of Marseille's commitment to promoting scientific culture. With Cats & Dogs, the teams at Marseille's Natural History Museum have created links between the exhibition and their permanent collections. 

Inauguration of Fragile! in Laval 

Until November 3, 2024, the ZOOM - CCSTI in Laval will be hosting our travelling exhibition for children, Fragile! We're delighted to welcome the exhibition to Laval for the first time!  

It was inaugurated at the end of March 2024 with the exhibition curator, Floriane Perot, and Maria Evora, Project Manager at Universcience, alongside the Zoom teams, its director Jeanne Marie Mas and city representatives, including Florian Bercault, Mayor of Laval and President of Laval Agglomération, Samia Soultani, Vice-President Higher Education Research Innovation International - Conseil Régional des Pays de la Loire and Olivier Lenoir, Director of Studies Groupe ESIEA, in charge of the development of the Laval Campus.

Special Effects inauguration at Cité des Télécoms

This week, the Cité des Télécoms inaugurated our travelling exhibition Special Effects: steal the scene! produced by the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie in co-production with the Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC). The exhibition will run there until the end of 2024.   

Representing Universcience at the event were Sophie Biecheler-Fiocconi, Delegate to the Institutional, Territorial and International Delegation, and Maria Evora, Project Manager.   

They were joined by the Mayor of Pleumeur-Bodou, Pierre Terrien, the Director of the Cité des Télécoms, Aude Bosquet Barth, and the President of the Orange Foundation, Élisabeth Tchoungui, as well as Emmanuel Ethis, Recteur de la Région Académique Bretagne and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, French director and screenwriter, patron of the exhibition.   

Together, they led a round-table discussion on special effects in the film industry, highlighting the potential pitfalls of digital technology. 

The exhibition takes visitors behind the scenes of special effects, covering every stage in the creation of a film, from pre-production, through the set, to post-production.   

Illustrated by a variety of references, the exhibition reveals the technical culture and innovations at work in major films, and allows visitors to experience or relive the history and evolution of special effects. It also reveals how art and technology feed off each other to produce the finest creations.  

Bravo to the Cité des Télécoms and Universcience teams for their collaboration on this wonderful project! 

To discover it at the Cité des Télécoms.

Inauguration of the Cancers exhibition in Saint Etienne

Our traveling exhibition Cancers was inaugurated on Friday February 9 at the Cité du design in Saint-Étienne Métropole. The city is hosting the exhibition as part of its cancer plan, launched in 2022. A first for a French city!

During the evening, Maud Gouy, co-curator of the exhibition, answered questions from journalists and showed the exhibition to those present, and artist Caroline Le Flour, actress, shared an extract from her show, "La chauve sourit", which looks back, with authenticity and casualness, on her experience facing the disease.

Today, cancer is unfortunately still all too often taboo. The aim of the exhibition is to give visitors a better understanding of the disease and its treatment, and to combat preconceived ideas about cancer, while raising awareness of everyday risk behaviours, prevention and screening.

Museum connections 2024

We're delighted to have taken part in this year's Museum connections, alongside the team from Teo (Touring Exhibitions Organisation). We'd like to thank them for their warm welcome and support at the Touring Exhibitions Pavilion.

The show was marked by inspiring conferences and great professional encounters, notably with other travelling exhibition producers.

The Universcience export team had the opportunity to promote our travelling exhibition Metamorphoses, currently on show at Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, in Paris, and available for touring from 2025.

Universcience was in Taiwan for the ICC Program!

As part of the ICC Immersion program, created to support French cultural companies in their international expansion, in which Universcience was fortunate enough to be selected: Marie-Françoise Bosq, Project Manager in our Export Department, spent 15 days in Taiwan, alongside eight other innovative French companies.

This trip created unique opportunities for collaboration between French companies and key players in Taiwan's cultural and creative industries, with over 120 business meetings organized.

Marie-Françoise represented and presented our institution at the TCCF (Taiwan Creative Content Fest) pitch. This was an opportunity to exchange best practices and promote our museographic expertise and our catalog of traveling exhibitions.

The French delegation also had the chance to explore the dynamic landscape of Taiwanese cultural institutions in Tainan, Taichung, Kaohsiung and Taipei, as well as meeting emblematic personalities from the world of Taiwanese culture. 

Hands On!

We are proud to announce that Universcience is now a member of Hands On! - the International Association of Children in Museums. This is an international network of museum professionals, whose aim is to make all museums interesting places for children, and to professionalize the children's museum sector.  

Every two years, they organize a conference, where network members and their partners come together to explore the latest developments in children's education in museums, children's museums and science centers.  

This year, Universcience is taking part in the event, which takes place in Bern, Switzerland, from October 25 to 27. Our teams are on hand: Raphael Chanay, Head of the Museum Projects Department, and Fatima Ouali, International Projects Manager.   

Raphael Chanay is taking part on Thursday, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in Salon No. 3 (in English), entitled "Current issues - How to shape interactive programs?" 

An opportunity to showcase our expertise in children's museography. Indeed, the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie is well known and recognized for its children's areas with: the Cité des enfants, which has welcomed hundreds of thousands of children every year for 30 years; and its temporary exhibitions dedicated to young audiences.

Creative Lab Suisse

Pauline Silhol, Project Manager in our Touring Exhibitions Department, was at Creative Lab Switzerland, a trade show co-organized by the French Embassy in Switzerland, Business France and BPI France.  

Show participants were first welcomed by the French Ambassador to Switzerland, Marion Paradas. Nathalie Trannois, Head of the International Immersion Unit at BPI France's Development and Innovation Support Division, and Cécile Clonts, Business France's Swiss Director, also took the floor. 

The day was punctuated by round-table discussions and exchanges between Swiss institutions and French companies. 

Pauline Silhol, for example, took part in a round-table discussion on the theme of accessibility, moderated by Cécile Clonts, to present our projects on this subject to French and Swiss cultural institutions and startups, and to promote Franco-Swiss cooperation. 

There was also a Universcience stand, where you could discover all our travelling exhibitions.

Think culture 2023

To mark the start of the 2023 academic year, the 8th Think Culture event was held on Tuesday 5th September, at the Centre Pompidou, organized by News Tank Culture and partnered by Universcience.

For this year's event, News Tank tackled a vast subject that is more topical than ever: "Culture and digital: the permanent revolution? A day dedicated to innovation in the cultural sector."

During the session "Museums and monumental heritage, their audiences, their own resources: how far can digital innovation go?", alongside Olivia Voisin, Musées de la ville d'Orléans Métropole ; Annick Lemoine, le Petit Palais ; and Abla Bernmiloud-Faucher, Centre des monuments nationaux, our President Bruno Maquart, presented the digital strategy of the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie and the Palais de la découverte. He mentioned a number of projects that have been put in place, from two angles: free offers, such as Blob, and paying offers. Today, each of our physical offerings is accompanied by a paying online digital offer, as with our Cancers and Crowdology exhibitions.

Bruno Maquart stressed the importance of experimentation when it comes to digital innovations: "We need to invent new languages and adapt. We need to learn. If it doesn't work, we do something else. The important thing is to experiment."

Following on from these various projects, our first lessons are: "There is no head-on competition between the digital distance offer and the physical offer. We're just coming off a record-breaking summer in terms of visitor numbers. Digital also works. We can develop two fronts at once: the physical visit and the digital."

In another session, Anne-Laure Mayer, Project Manager at Universcience, presented the "Fab Lab at school: how to stimulate the development of scientific, technical and industrial culture among young people through 'do-it-yourself'?"

The aim of the project is to "stimulate interest in science and the scientific approach." The benefits for the students are manifold, with an increase in their desire to learn, to share, and in their self-confidence; and for the teachers, who develop, among other things, collaborative work.

In conclusion, it was a day rich in constructive exchanges, to move forward together towards greater innovation in the cultural sector.

"What's new in the Middle Ages?" at the Abbey of Arthous

Since May 2nd, the Abbey of Arthous, a historical jewel nestled in Les Landes, is the host of our traveling exhibition "What's new in the Middle Ages?", and this until October 31st, 2023.

Its inauguration was held on Saturday, May 13. We were privileged to have Isabelle Catteddu, curator of the exhibition and archaeologist from the Inrap (Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives), who went over some key elements. She was followed by Rachel Durquety, Departmental Councillor; Corinne Dampierre, Interregional Director of INRAP Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Overseas; and Marie-Sophie Mugica, our Head of the Export Department, who enriched this day with their valuable perspectives.

The Landes department prepared a dynamic program around the exhibition, including workshops, lectures and games such as archery and a construction game.

We are delighted to announce that dozens of school groups have already booked guided tours, testifying to the considerable interest in this exciting journey through the Middle Ages.

"What's New in the Middle Ages" offers an innovative perspective on a thousand years of history, thanks to the fruitful collaboration with INRAP, and is a treasure trove of wonder and new insights into this intriguing period.

Museum Connections 2023

Museum Connections is an international trade fair, resolutely focusing on the business and sustainable challenges of museums, cultural and touristic venues, which highlights trends and innovations to imagine new visitors' experiences. 

Universcience was on "The Touring Exhibitions Pavilion" on Tuesday 17th and Wednesday 18th January 2023. The Export Department team presented our new touring exhibitions and expertise.

You could also meet Universcience, the Teo team and other producers of travelling exhibitions during the session "Experiences & Innovation in travelling exhibitions" which took place on Tuesday, January 17th from 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm during the conferences of the Innovation TV set. We presented Crowdology, an exhibition which addresses a phenomenon that has never been explored in a scientific exhibition before.