In Nantes, the novelist’s birthplace, Alexandra Müller will take over the Jules Verne Museum in September. The new director will lead the future Cité des imaginaires where the Jules Verne Museum will be transferred. She succeeds Marie Masson who initiated the Cité des Imaginaires project in 2022.
A new 5,100 m2 cultural complex, the Cité des imaginaires is set to open to the public in the fall of 2028 for the bicentenary of the birth of Jules Verne. It is housed in a former concrete flour mill located on the banks of the Loire and redeveloped by the Dutch architecture firm Neutelings Riedijk. The center will house a media library, temporary exhibition spaces and, on the third floor, the collections of the Jules Verne Museum. The center will also offer artist residencies and workshops around writing and drawing in a landscaped interior garden. Admission will be free.
The total budget for the new Cité des imaginaires, financed by the city of Nantes, is 50 million euros, including 38 million for the works. The museum will leave its former location in a 19th-century bourgeois house on the Butte Sainte-Anne for this new place. The collections of the Jules Verne Museum include around a hundred original manuscripts, letters, objects, thousands of posters and iconographic documents.
Alexandra Müller (47 years old), originally from Germany, has degrees in visual arts, French literature, philosophy and aesthetics (from the University of Münster). After several experiences in galleries and at the Goethe Institut (Lyon), she has been an executive assistant and research fellow at the Centre Pompidou-Metz since 2008. Specializing in science fiction literature, she was curator of the exhibition “Les portes du possible – Arts & science fiction” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2022-2023.
