Basel’s museums get night fever

Thousands flocked to the Jean Tinguely Museum swissinfo.ch

It's midnight in Basel, the temperature is hovering around zero and I'm standing in a lengthy queue in a dimly lit street waiting to enter the Pharmacy Museum.

Inside the place is teeming with museum-goers, gawping at pickled snakes, human body parts and jars of dried “dragon’s blood”. In one corner, staff dressed in period costume are leading visitors on a merry Murder Mystery trail, while downstairs in the “Bar Celsius” liquorice sticks, vitamin cocktails and brightly-coloured sweets are being dished out to young and old alike.

For the second year in succession, Basel, Switzerland’s cultural treasure chest, has opened the doors to more than 30 museums from 6pm until 2am. The city’s streets are a sea of night owls drifting from museum to museum, indulging their senses in everything from the sounds of flamenco to the stunning canvases of the Beyeler Foundation and the antique contents of the Museum of Ancient Art.

Enticing the wary viewer

“The main reason for Museum Night is we want to offer people who are not so used to going to museums the chance to visit them in a more relaxed style,” says Corinne Eichenberger of the city’s museum service. “A lot of young people, especially, don’t go to museums because they have a serious, boring image and with an event like this they can see they are special places.”

I began my journey a little after 8pm beneath the city’s towering cathedral, where lines of passenger-laden buses were disappearing into the night at 10-minute intervals.

Faced with the choice of routes, I plumped for Green and headed off on a tour that was to take in the Hörnli Cemetery, the Jean Tinguely Museum and the Natural History Museum, before finishing up at the Pharmacy Museum.

Into the gloom

Twenty minutes later I was standing with a group at the gates of the cemetery waiting to be led into the gloom by one of the many knowledgeable staff trying to ensure that no one lost their way in the dark. They needn’t have worried: fires had been lit along the paths leading to the cemetery’s museum.

The museum, which was founded in 1994, belongs to the European Federation of Funeral Museums, and is a temple to the disposal of the dead. Horse-drawn hearses, coffins of all shapes and sizes, urns and cross-shaped gravestones rest in peace along with wreaths decorated with pearls and, in some instances, the hair of a loved one.

My guide, Philippe Kuttler, who would make the perfect dinner party guest, revealed that undertakers tended to use women’s hair for the wreaths since it survives for 100 to 150 years. Male hair, as in life, tends to start falling apart after 30 to 40 years.

I was particularly taken by the rather unusual sight of a crucifix bearing a Christ-figure with breasts – a rarity as Kuttler explained: “It dates from around 1720-30, and at the time there were many crucifixes bearing women but the catholic church destroyed them all and this is one of the last – if not the last – which is in existence.”

Enraptured by a scorpion

Thoroughly enlightened, it was time to hop on the Green bus once again to check out the equally challenging work of the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely and his wife Niki de Saint Phalle. The museum was packed with bodies eager to gaze at de Saint Phalle’s vivid, towering totems and to walk through Tinguely’s giant sculptures of scrap metal. But it really was like the first day of the January sales inside Mario Botta’s architectural gem and I had a date to keep with a scorpion.

After again battling through the crowds pouring in and out of the Natural History Museum, I made my way past collections of crabs, stuffed trout and a life-size rhinoceros to a small third-floor room where Matt Braunwalder, head of the world’s only Arachnological Information and Coordination Centre, was holding forth to an enrapt audience on that much-maligned creature: the scorpion.

“They have a bad reputation because of the sting and the venom, so it’s important to give good information and dispel the rumours about scorpions,” he told me.

Helping to win over new converts to the cause were his pet 10cm-long Nebo scorpion from Saudi Arabia, which was born in Braunwalder’s lab 17 years ago, and a smaller indigenous Swiss scorpion from canton Ticino.

“It’s rather harmless, with a sting like a bee or a wasp,” he said. “The possibility of someone being stung by one in Switzerland is absolutely nil.”

Somewhat reassured, I left Braunwalder to continue his PR offensive on behalf of his beloved arachnids, which was probably not such a bad idea. I’m not sure what he would have made of the very dead-looking scorpion sandwiched between a snake and a frog on the walls of the Pharmacy Museum.

By Adam Beaumont