Exhibition guide

The exhibition brings together an exceptional collection of graphic documents, contemporary works of art and digital replicas of lost sites. Like a great report, the whole weaves a documented, visual and sensitive story, where the views of actors and witnesses, architects and artists meet.

Visit details

  • Dates: From Wednesday May 20, 2026 to Sunday January 3, 2027: Thursday from 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
  • Venue: Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, 1 , place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, Paris
  • Price: De 10 à 13 euros.
  • Audience: All audiences
  • Source: Event page

About the exhibition

An unprecedented international mobilization then began to rebuild the destroyed sites, drawing on archaeological excavations and the memory of Malian artisans.

If war has always led to destruction, the beginning of the 21st century reveals an intensification and systematization of attacks on cultural and natural heritage. This erasure also affects ordinary and intangible heritage, through population displacements, “cultural cleansing”, urbicide, ruricide or ecocide. The exhibition highlights this contemporary reality and asks an essential question: how does war reveal what is irremediably lost, while bringing to light the gestures of resistance that make future repair possible?

Through a remarkable set of maps, texts, models, photographs, videos, works Far from the image of a “clean” war, these practices reveal the extent of the violence inflicted on places and societies.

Resist

Faced with erasure, forms of resistance emerge. From Timbuktu to Odessa, from Bâmiyân to Gaza, armed conflicts make heritage a privileged target. Alongside major international institutions, NGOs, associations, groups of citizens, architects and researchers act to protect, document and transmit threatened heritage. contemporarys and digital replicas produced by Iconem, the exhibition offers a journey in three sequences. Faced with this destruction, the Heritage in Resistance exhibition questions the gestures of erasure, but also the forms of resistance and repair which allow us to think about the future from the ruins.

In 2012, the destruction of the mausoleums of Timbuktu, listed as UNESCO world heritage sites, marked a historic turning point: for the first time, the voluntary annihilation of cultural monuments was qualified as a war crime by the Criminal Court In areas of conflict, every everyday gesture, every story, becomes an act of resistance, helping to preserve memory and support physical survival.Conceived as a major report, it weaves a documented, visual and sensitive story, combining the views of architects, artists, researchers, field workers and witnesses.

The exhibition, by putting the tumult of the world at a distance, offers the visitor an essential time for reflection in the face of the continuous flow of information.

The three sequences of the exhibitionErase

The destruction of heritage takes international. today in multiple forms: dynamiting of emblematic sites, massive bombing of cities, deliberate abandonment of territories, looting and trafficking of cultural property.