Jean Starobinski. Relations critiques

Celebrating the centenary of Jean Starobinski, the EPFL+ECAL Lab in collaboration with the Swiss National Library and Apptitude SA unveiled a new kind of digital exhibition. Awarded as the “Best User Experience 2020” by the Meilleur du Web, the project brings together literary expertise, museum research, design, engineering and psychology. It aims to highlight major writers and their contributions to thought, from the collections of the Swiss Literary Archives.

The end of 2020 marked the centenary of Jean Starobinski (1920-2019), the renowned writer from Geneva, who marked reflections on critique around the world. His work certainly addresses literary critique, but also touches on his other favourite disciplines such as medicine, the history of ideas, music and the fine arts. His writings stand out for their relevance and international impact, but also for their accessibility.

Jean Starobinski left his archives to the Swiss National Library: an exceptional heritage comprising manuscripts, correspondence, documentation and more than 40,000 books. But how can this wealth of information be curated to express his works, his background and his personality for a wide audience?

The Swiss Literary Archives (Swiss National Library) in collaboration with the EPFL+ECAL Lab and Apptitude SA thus embarked on an experimental project that aimed to imagine a new digital platform capable of meeting this challenge. This project relies on the skills of both institutions. It combines research work, which explores the principles of design, curation and reproduction of documents, with the development of a digital exhibition accessible to the public.

The digital exhibition experiments with several key concepts to be discovered online. For example, one of them consists in offering the public a main route, made up of thematic islands representative of the author.

According to their wishes, visitors can decide to look at an object from a new perspective: the theme disappears and the object is placed in a historical or typological context, – as if the rooms in a museum could be reconfigured and the contents re-arrange themselves accordingly. Visitors can thus trace their path according to their expectations and discoveries, changing perspectives and contexts. They may either follow a main narrative or delve into in-depth readings.