At the Louvre

The Kitchen presents At the Louvre in collaboration with Musée du Louvre and New York Review Books. First a royal palace, then a museum, the Louvre has inspired poets for centuries – from Renaissance authors to modern day practitioners of the spoken word. Authors, thinkers, and artists are inspired by the Louvre’s collection representing cultures around the world and across millenaries. These thinkers and writers wander the rooms of the Louvre, contemplate its masterpieces, and their context within and beyond the museum. As part of its contemporary programs, the Louvre has launched initiatives that bring together these thinkers, artists, and authors along with members of its staff and communities to read the museum anew.

At the Louvre is part of this ensemble, an initiative that led to a book published in 2024. Celebrated poets from around the world were each invited to compose a new piece about the palace-museum, writing in the language of their own and translated into French and English. The writers represent diverse geographies and generations – the youngest are in their twenties, the oldest in their nineties. They evoke the museum’s artworks, staircases, corridors, and the many lives and spirits contained within. Some writers look at a detail from a painting; others speak to the passing of time encapsulated at the Louvre. The book came out in French with Seghers and in English with New York Review Books, marking both publishing houses’ first collaboration with the Louvre.

To complement this dual language publication, a soundtrack was composed, in which 95 of the 102 poets read their poem in their own tongue, thereby making a statement for an open-ended perception of the museum and, with it, a multiple approach to humankind. Each poet states their name at the beginning of their reading, enabling listeners to find their way through the opacity of languages they may be unfamiliar with. Meaning is never a mere given, it must be experienced and discovered: such is the lesson of poetry.

This soundtrack is an experimental, performative piece, in which voices are heard across cultures and times – echoing through the many lives of art. This sound piece premiered in the medieval Louvre, the inner sanctum of the institution. An immaterial marker of humanity, it was designed to travel. Its first step outside the walls of the Louvre is at The Kitchen, opening the Winter/Spring 2026 program. The Kitchen, as a central institution for performing arts and experimentations across mediums, is the ideal space for an exhibition of such a sound piece – one conceived in dialogue with a New York publishing house.

For ten days, visitors are able to listen to the four-hour recording in a loop, finding their way across languages they know, others they do not; copies of the publication is also on hand, enabling listeners to navigate the meaning and negotiate their relationship with other cultures. Artworks from the museum and the museum itself are brought into central focus, and their impact reverberates within and beyond the borders of the institution. This program is organized by Donatien Grau and Nicolas Marbeau (Musée du Louvre), with Antoine Caro (Seghers) and Edwin Frank (NYRB).