Now located at the Armand Jacq Forum, in the heart of the Bourg de Carantec (Finistère), the Carantec Maritime Museum benefits from an increased exhibition surface, going to 388 m² on the ground floor of the new building, to which the community tourist office is added. The total cost of the rehabilitation and move of the museum amounts to € 880,000, funded up to € 430,000 by public subsidies. “The objective is to bring together in a unique place maritime memory and tourist reception” explains the town hall of Carantec in its official communication.
The new museographic arrangement is organized in four axes: the shipwrecked boats whose wreckage of the alcide (Malouin corsair of the 18th century), the work boats linked to fishing, oyster farming and picking gull, pleasure boats, finally escape boats, devoted to the history of the Sibiril network, England during the Second World War. The scenography, renewed, incorporates didactic devices promoting interactivity, as well as a new graphic identity designed by the graphic designer Véfa Lucas; The logo is inspired by sail seams.
Created in 1992 under the leadership of the municipality and a team of local volunteers, the museum initially installed in a modest space, was responsible for preserving and presenting the Naval Carantécoise tradition and the memory of local sites. The permanent collection brings together models, tools, archive documents and objects from excavations from Morlaix Bay. The site highlights the singularity of the Sibiril network, responsible for the escape from 197 people to England between 1940 and 1944: “Thanks to Ernest Sibiril and his men, Carantec has become a clandestine high place of maritime resistance”.
In Brittany, the reopening of the museum is part of a context of redeployment of maritime museums, often associated with similar issues of renovation and accessibility. For comparison, the National Museum of the Navy of Brest has also embarked on the diversification of its scenographic routes and devices between 2017 and 2023, while that of Douarnenez remains centered on the collections of restored boats afloat with its Port-Museum. In Carantec, the pooling of the museum and the tourist office in the Armand Jacq forum testifies to a desire to federate cultural offer and promotion of local heritage in a logic of pole, a notable singularity in the face of other mainly autonomous Breton establishments.
