Flagship exhibition of the 2025–2026 season at the Musée départemental Albert-Kahn near Paris, Benin Round Trip. Views of Dahomey in 1930 offers a new reading of the films and photographs produced during a mission of the Archives de la Planète carried out by the Catholic missionary Francis Aupiais and the camera operator Frédéric Gadmer in Dahomey (present-day Benin) from January to May 1930.
An immersive Franco-Beninese dialogue that questions the gaze cast on extra-European cultures, in a context of colonial domination and the birth of ethnography.
The 1930 mission to Dahomey is unique in several respects: it was the only foray by the Archives de la Planète into sub-Saharan Africa, the last large-scale expedition before the project ended following the collapse of Kahn’s bank, and it stemmed from the initiative of an atypical clergyman, Father Francis Aupiais (1877–1945). A missionary priest committed to a long-term effort to deepen understanding of African cultures, Aupiais contacted Albert Kahn in 1927 and persuaded him to finance his plan to document Dahomean cultural and religious practices an undertaking that naturally aligned with the philanthropist’s humanist project.
One of the earliest film collections in French ethnography
Father Aupiais’s aim was to contribute to an “African recognition” by documenting evangelization but above all Dahomey’s traditional culture, in particular royal ceremonies and vodún rites, which he held in high esteem. The mission lasted four and a half months, during which Frédéric Gadmer produced 1,102 autochromes (color photographs) and shot 140 reels of film under Aupiais’s direction. These films—the first on such a scale to be shot in Dahomey—constitute the largest group of films in the Archives de la Planète and one of the earliest film collection of French ethnography, five years after the founding of the Institut d’ethnologie in Paris and one year before the Dakar–Djibouti mission.
Bénin aller-retour. Regards sur le Dahomey de 1930
Through 14 June 2026
Musée départemental Albert-Kahn
2 rue du Port
92100 Boulogne-Billancourt
www.albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr
