by the Members of CASOAR
In the Summer of 2017, a group of friends studying at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris who specialised in the Arts and Anthropology of Oceania came together and created CASOAR. The acronym stands for “Cabinet Atypique de la Société des Océanophiles Amateurs de Rocambolesque”, and is also the French word for cassowary.
Seeing that Oceanic art and anthropology had little online presence in French, we thought of creating a blog that would be widely accessible yet scientifically accurate. Our academic training proved essential for combining knowledge with popularisation in order to reach out to the largest audience possible.
While we all met through the Ecole du Louvre, and more precisely in the Art and Anthropology of Oceania module, the team is now scattered across Europe. Enzo and Clémentine are Master’s students at the Sainsbury Research Unit in Norwich (UK), Morgane is studying conservation in Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Camille, Soizic and Gabrielle are Master’s students at the Ecole du Louvre (Paris), Garance is studying anthropology in Paris, and Margot K. is studying natural history in Paris. Marion has just finished her PhD thesis on private and public collections of Oceanic art while Elsa and Pierre both work in the art market, respectively in Belgium and in Paris. Alice is curator at the Cité Internationale de la tapisserie, Aubusson (France) and Margaux, Iris and Margot D. are all working in museum institutions. This common ground and diversity in our studies and personal itineraries has allowed us to develop a pluri-disciplinary approach to Oceania as a region.
We officially launched casoar.org in October 2017 and have published more than 200 articles since on a variety of topics. We explore themes related to material culture, history of collections as well as anthropological concepts and classical anthropological authors. Our articles also address current events related to Oceanic art and anthropology such as art sales, exhibitions and new film releases but also current topics and debates like climate change. Photography, literature and pop culture are all part of our thinking and we aim to share distinctive voices by interviewing multiple people.
What is really unique about CASOAR is its monthly diary of events related to Oceanic art throughout the globe. It references exhibitions, art sales, conferences, workshops, call for papers, art shows…
In February 2019, twelve of us formally registered CASOAR as an association in order to diversify our activities. This new status has allowed us to get involved in multiple partnerships; for instance, with the Bourgogne Tribal Show in Burgundy, France in 2018 and 2019 where we organised tours of the art fair and wrote articles for the catalogue. We also wrote multiple articles for Anthony Meyer’s catalogue for The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF 2019) and enriched museum labels for a French regional museum. With the Ecole du Louvre’s Student Union we organised a conference called “From the Vahine to Moana: European myths of Oceania” which was open to the public.
As a group, you can usually find us roaming the streets of Saint-Germain des Prés during the annual Parisian art fair Parcours des Mondes. We also try to attend the European Pacific Art Association (PAA Europe) yearly conferences and as many conferences and exhibitions organised in Europe as possible.
In early 2020 we rebuilt our website to make it more accessible and offer new search tools like our interactive map which allows the reader to find all the articles related to specific regions of the Pacific. Readers can now also search for writers’ articles after reading their biographies. Overall, one of the biggest changes is the complete redesign of our visual identity – the website is now more colourful and makes visits and reading even more enjoyable.
We also have an important social media presence. Thanks to Instagram we have created guides of museums we visited (in Europe and in the Pacific) and where there is Oceanic art on display. We also use this platform to share photographs and video content of exhibitions, museums and art fairs we personally visit. This account allows us to build a visual archive of institutions’ displays internationally. We are also present both on Facebook and Twitter with current posts about all our publications and participation in special events.
While our audience is already international, with a great outreach in the French-speaking countries of the Pacific (New Caledonia, Vanuatu, French Polynesia), we wish to make our content even more widely available by translating our articles in English. We started this process in 2020 and wish to publish more and more articles in both the French and English languages.
Some of the team are currently working on a new project: WAVES, CASOAR’s podcast! While there is no specific release date for the project yet, we aim to use this new platform to discuss anthropological topics and to interview people from various fields and countries to allow more diverse voices to be heard.
If you wish to receive an update each time a new article is published on CASOAR, please subscribe to our newsletter at http://casoar.org