Exposition graveurs sur nacre - Maison Higginson

Located in Nouméa, South Province, the city hosts the world's largest public collection dedicated to New Caledonia penal colony art. This exhibition reveals an unprecedented cultural heritage of engraved mother-of-pearl shells—nautiluses, trocas, and pearl oysters—crafted by convicts in the French Pacific penal system between 1864 and 1931. Known as "camelote" (convict craftwork), these historical pieces were created using basic tools and traded by prisoners to improve their daily life. This major event brings together over 300 engraved shells from the Serge Kakou collection (acquired in 2003), the Mireille Ardimanni collection (acquired in 2022), and exceptional loans from local private collections, the MUZ, and the South Province. Scientific curation is led by Louis Lagarde, Associate Professor at the University of New Caledonia, who identified 30 mother-of-pearl engravers based on 25 years of research analyzing a corpus of more than 1,000 items.