The Little Prince, the immersive Odyssey: diving into the new exhibition at the Bassins des Lumières in Bordeaux

The walls of the former submarine base in Bordeaux will host a new exhibition this Friday: that dedicated to the Little Prince. On the program, an epilogue, 11 chaptersa prologue, to immerse yourself in this fable around roses, foxes, snakes, deserts, and other planets. A journey to understand the world that surrounds this little prince, because, as the author writes, “we only see clearly with the heart, the essential is invisible to the eyes”. The exhibition is created to stick as close as possible to what is either a novel, a poetic story, a children’s story, a philosophical tale or all at once… The Little Prince remains the second most translated book in the world after the Bible ! The exhibition is therefore in partnership with the estate of Antoine de St Exupéry. Thomas Rivière, the great-grandnephew of Antoine De Saint-Exupéry represents the foundation, he explains: “It’s always very complicated to adapt The Little Prince, whether for cinema, TV series, music or theater, because you have to seek out that emotion that you have when reading. We receive projects every day from all over the world and our job is to say no, because we don’t want to chase projects that don’t reflect our values, and this project is a good choice, because that the result is up to par.”

An exhibition with different reading levels

This book accompanied Nicolas Charlin, the artistic director of the exhibition, throughout his childhood, a work that he regularly likes to reread. He therefore wanted to make this show, a moment accessible to all. Especially since, for the first time, unlike major exhibitions on painters for example, there was no majestic piece to project, everything had to be created: “We had around forty drawings and watercolors as a starting point and a text and based on that, we had to fill all the walls and spend 40 minutes around this story to offer this exhibition. As with the basic work, we wanted to have something with different reading levels, that the exhibition is just as universal as the novel The Little Prince can be so yes, it’s very colorful, there is a lot of animation , it moves a lot, the characters come to life, but there are also a lot of texts that have also been staged.” “The Little Prince” was published in 1943 in New York. In 1944 Antoine de Saint Exupéry mysteriously disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea aboard his military plane. More than 300 million copies of the book have already been sold all over the world.

Practical information

The exhibition is visible every afternoon during school holidays from 2:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. then Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday afternoon until December 31. The prices can be found below.