The Council of Europe Museum Prize for 2015 has been awarded to the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (MUCEM) in Marseille, France.
The museum was selected for the prize from a shortlist of three candidates by the Culture Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) at a meeting on Friday in Paris.
The museum displayed “a new and innovative concept, in a breathtaking site with outstanding architecture, which perfectly fulfils all the criteria of the Council of Europe Museum Prize,” said PACE’s rapporteur on the prize Vesna Marjanović (Serbia, SOC).
MUCEM explores the Mediterranean as the birthplace of civilisations and a crossroads of both European and Arab cultures. Ms Marjanović particularly praised the museum’s role as a “contemporary Agora”, attracting a wide public with an impressive programme of educational visits, debates with artists and writers, seminars, festivals and concerts.
The Council of Europe Museum Prize has been awarded annually since 1977 to a museum judged to have made a significant contribution to the understanding of European cultural heritage.
The winning museum will be presented with a bronze statuette, “La femme aux beaux seins” by Joan Miró, which the museum will keep for a year, as well as a diploma.
The prize is decided on the basis of a shortlist presented by a jury of the European Museum Forum, and forms part of the European Museum of the Year Awards.
Recent winners of the prize include the Baksi Museum in Turkey (2014), the Museum of Liverpool in the United Kingdom (2013), and the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, Germany (2012).
