Lausanne, 26 august 2023
Friday was much like our first day in other cities: we always walk around historic areas, getting a sense of the place, and looking for photo opportunities.
I like to see how stores identify themselves with signs above the street or sidewalk. Here’s an example, pretty similar to others I’ve seen in other cities. You may be able to get a sense of Lausanne’s steep and narrow streets as well.
It’s cloudy and hot, with rain in the forecast.
The History Museum of Lausanne features this model of the city. The accompanying video on the back wall explains the development of various areas and the growth of the city. I’m glad that the metro and some pedestrian elevators were built recently.
The permanent exhibition including all that history starts on an upper floor of the building, so our experience started at a staircase from the lobby. The stairs appear to be littered with tacks, as you can see here, and I thought we had taken a wrong turn. Nope. As this is definitely the right staircase and there is a path past the tacks, we took a closer look.
The “tacks” are actually little tiny people, smaller than any little green army men you’ve ever seen. There are about 32,000 of them in various places throughout the museum, mostly on the stairs.
These figures represent displaced people, refugees, immigrants, and anyone else who isn’t “supposed” to be where they are. The artist who assembled this installation questions our relationship to the arrival of “the other” in our spaces and our lives. They’re just little tiny person figures, but they’re surprisingly real and moving.
Now on to Saturday, and our visit to the Olympic Museum down by the lake. The International Olympic Committee headquarters are in Lausanne, and this museum is a big deal. Dan and I (lucky us!) went to the Games in Los Angeles in 1984, in Calgary in 1988, in Barcelona in 1992, and in Sydney in 2000. With that happy history, this museum was a natural.
It hadn’t started raining yet, so I was pleased to get these zippy cyclists as we walked up from the lake. It took me a while to break the code of the inscriptions on the stairs — city names, Olympic years, and a person’s name — but I got it after seeing “Los Angeles 1984 R. johnson.” Keep reading.
Longtime readers of this blog may remember the Tarot Garden in Capalbio, at which I marveled in 2016. It was the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, whose work we also saw in Japan in 2018. I don’t really like her sculptural style, but it’s so recognizable that I feel she’s our friend and I wonder where we’ll see her next.
That’s all for the sculpture; time for the shoes. The Olympic Museum has lots of artifacts from the many instances of the Games, including equipment and clothing from the athletes. We remember the rainy night when Cathy Freeman won the 400 meters in Sydney. We were in the upper stands, and the stadium was absolutely rocking — like, lifting off — when she (the Aussie Aboriginal favorite) came from behind and took the gold. These are her shoes.
Oh, wow.
And that inscription on the stairs? Rafer Johnson carried tthe torch into the LA Coliseum and lit the flame in 1984. All those other named people did the same in their Olympic cities and years.
The MHB Foghorn 