The exhibit “En route pour la vie” (“On the road to life”) plunges visitors into the past thanks to sound extracts drawn from INA archives, the French National Audiovisual Institute.
Created in 1982, the Road Safety Delegation acts on road users’ behaviour to make them more responsible and contributes to the reinforcement of the safety of road infrastructures, vehicles and users’ protection equipment.
To mark the 50th anniversary of its creation, the agency “The Oval Office” created the exhibit “En route pour la vie”, a travelling exhibition presenting ten iconic vehicles for ten key road safety measures, all paired with sounds, music, news flashes, information related to road safety, … all drawn from the INA archives.
For Benoît Barennes, creative director, it has been an obvious choice to use archive resources to highlight historical events, but also to create in the visitors a form of nostalgia and sympathy. He explains that archival imagery allows us to see what people have seen in past; this sort of communication creates empathy, because we get to share a small portion of the past with the people who have lived it.
The public has highly appreciated this format, and some very moving feedback was given, especially from people who have lost loved ones in accidents.
The project From Archive to Alive seeks to enhance the importance of archives for the present days: these resources can not only help us study historical events, but can be a mean to better understand it, make reasoned choices and convey emotions.