Facing terrorism with civic memory: an open-air exhibition in front of City Hall

November 13 will mark the tenth anniversary of the 2015 attacks that shook the capital and France, giving rise to moving commemorations in Paris. In this context, the Terrorism Memorial Museum, which has not yet opened its doors, is organizing a free outdoor exhibition , "Facing Terrorism, a Citizen's Memory," on the gates of ParisCity Hall from November 3 to 30, 2025.

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While we wait to learn more about the museum, this exhibition is a way of presenting to the public for the first time part of the future permanent collections, which already include nearly 3,000 items (donations from victims, testimonies, court seals), currently visible in the form of photographs of objects covering various attacks since the late 1960s.

This three-part exhibition first evokes the violence of the attack with objects bearing wounds, altered or unfinished, embodying the brutality of terrorist acts, such as the bullet-riddled slate from the La Belle Équipe restaurant, the unfinished guitar by luthier Romain Naufle, the bag of a Bataclan survivor, and the "UTA" belt buckle from the DC-10 that was destroyed in flight.

The second part shows the resistance of everyday society, that of the police, firefighters, teachers, journalists, and flight crews, with the RAID bulletproof vest marked by the assault in Toulouse and Montauban, the cap of a firefighter from November 13, 2015, and the Nagra recorder in tribute to RFI journalists Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon.

Finally, the exhibition presents imagesof the resilience of those affected, particularly through artistic creation, with C215's portrait "Je suis Ahmed" (I am Ahmed) in tribute to police officer Ahmed Merabet, the textile work "Tisser le silence" (Weaving Silence) (Nice attack) and the painting "Un long voyage dans les rêves" (A Long Journey in Dreams) painted by a survivor of the 2018 Strasbourg Christmas market attack. A touching exhibition accessible to all, a temporary memorial while awaiting the museum.