Valérie Perlès
conservatrice du patrimoine
Conservatrice du patrimoine, Valérie Perlès est titulaire d’une thèse en ethnologie portant sur la production des objets du voyage. Elle a travaillé pendant une dizaine d’années dans des musées en tant que chercheuse et commissaire d’expositions, et a également assuré la direction de plusieurs ouvrages collectifs. Elle a dirigé, entre 2011 et 2019, le musée départemental Albert-Kahn à Boulogne-Billancourt, où elle a piloté la rénovation. Elle est, depuis 2022, responsable de la Direction du patrimoine et des expositions au musée de la Poste. Elle vient de publier Un roman dahoméen, ouvrage qui revient sur ses dernières recherches consacrées à plusieurs collectes ethnographiques effectuées au Dahomey.
Croire et guérir Et délivrez-nous du mal
Valérie Perlès
Throughout history, healing has taken many forms—religious, magical, and often at odds with more rational medical or scientific practices. The book Croire et guérir offers a journey through the history of healing practices, ranging from relics of the Middle Ages to today’s diverse therapeutic approaches, revealing symbolic gestures and ancestral knowledge.
Divine punishment, acts of witchcraft, a stroke of bad luck, accidents, viral attacks, pollution, physiological disorders, aging, fatigue, stress… The causes of illness are manifold and fall into various categories, religious, spiritual, physical, and psychological.
To protect themselves from illness, all peoples have developed medical knowledge based empirically on the environment, the body, and the therapeutic properties of certain substances, though sometimes disconnected from anatomical, physiological, or naturalistic understanding. Ultimately, it is the complex, ambiguous, complementary, and antagonistic relationships between the soul and the body that are at the heart of this discussion.
Centered around more than 300 highly diverse images, including objects, photographs, and facsimiles, many of which have never been published before—the book features texts by numerous specialists (researchers, anthropologists, historians), as well as works by contemporary artists that offer a fresh perspective.
The resolutely contemporary layout deliberately plays with scales and compositions, transforming each page into a space to explore.
This book offers a surprising and unusual overview of healing and its many practices throughout history.
Croire et guérir Et délivrez-nous du mal
20 x 22,8 cm (à la française), 304 pages on 2 papers, about 300 reproductions, impression : soft-bound, CMYK color model, with flap.
Graphic conception : L’Atelier d’édition
ISBN: 978-2-84314-136-2
Nouvelles du Paradis. La carte postale de vacances
Marie-Ève Bouillon / Valérie Perlès
Since the end of the 19th century, postcards have played an essential role in the pictorial representation of territories. Initially linked to migration, they gradually became a vacation ritual with the rise of paid leaves and mass tourism. Nouvelles du paradis takes an original, dual approach to the postcard, considering it both as an object of correspondence and as an industrialized, editorialized item. Conceived as a reference work, this book links various disciplines’ (history, sociology, ethnology, contemporary art) contributions to paint a very complete picture of the evolution of this popular yet almost extinct medium.
Nouvelles du Paradis. La carte postale de vacances
20 x 25 cm, 250 pages, circa 150 reproductions in quadrichromy and black and white, hardcover. Text: French. Graphic design: Lorna McCallum.