For Museum Connections, Charlotte Baugé spoke to Grégoire Monnier, Director of Culturespaces Studio, a Culturespaces subsidiary specializing in the production of immersive exhibitions. In 2020, Grégoire Monnier joins Culturespaces Digital as Director. Under his leadership, Culturespaces Digital became Culturespaces Studio in 2024, strengthening its network of artistic and technological talent to develop large-format immersive experiences in France and abroad. For two years now, Culturespaces Studio has opened up its catalog to the international market. In this interview, we take a look at current and future projects, the challenges of itinerancy, and a look back at Museum Connections 2025, an international trade show that attracted 6,208 visitors and focused on trends and innovations for imagining new visitor experiences in museums and cultural venues.
Can you tell us about your network and Culturespaces Studio’s current projects?
Grégoire Monnier (G.M.) – Culturespaces Studio is the production house for Culturespaces‘ immersive exhibitions. We supply the exhibitions for our nine permanent art centers. Our next permanent space will open in Hamburg (Germany) in April. In 2026, we plan to develop a space in Tokyo in collaboration with a Japanese franchise partner (same formula as for our two sites in Korea, in Seoul and Jeju).
At the same time, we continue to develop licenses for our white-label content (with no mention of Culturespaces). In this area, we are currently working with Montreal for theTintin exhibition (also shown in Brussels and Lausanne). We are also working with a Brazilian operator who is currently broadcasting our productions on Klimt and Gaudí. Finally, we have several requests from venues that don’t want to open digital art centers on a franchise basis, but want to test our content to potentially launch themselves in the future.
What are the roaming issues you encounter in your productions?
(G.M.) – Initially, we didn’t design our products for touring. As we built up our network of venues, we learned to adapt our exhibitions from one site to another, designing them to be resizable and adapted to our very different venues. It usually takes us a year to create an exhibition and five months to move it from one location to another, because we have to redo the entire staging.
It’s an approach in which each exhibition is conceived first and foremost for its artistic and immersive quality, then adapted for touring according to the venue. Rather than standardizing our productions to make them immediately transportable.
Although we’re a little less competitive, Culturespaces Studio is recognized for the quality of its large-format exhibitions and the richness of the themes we cover, rooted in popular culture (such as Tintin or Asterix). So that’s what our customers are looking for.
As opposed to a “turnkey” formula, Culturespaces Studio chooses to accompany and involve its customers in the technical set-up of their exhibition, to ensure optimal adaptation to their space and audience. This means we have contacts who are often well organized, with experience of exhibition touring and solid teams to build projects together. In return, we provide them with a wealth of resources to help them make the right exhibition choices and adapt their marketing strategy.
Why did you abandon the great painters for other themes such as comics, history and the conquest of space?
(G.M.) – Our main exhibitions are always dedicated to the great masters of painting. That said, we have decided to round out our program with exhibitions on popular culture themes, aimed at a wider public and, in particular, families during the school vacations. And it’s these exhibitions that attract the most interest abroad.
Themes such as Tintin, Destination Cosmos (an exhibition we did on space with the Centre national d’études spatiales in France and NASA in the United States), The Little Prince and Asterix have received a great deal of international interest. There’s a really interesting visitor path to be created around these exhibitions. We can imagine a lot of things, making them enjoyable for the whole family, while at the same time deploying numerous derivative products in the store. This makes for a rich experience for the visitor and a reassuring one for the operator.
By way of introduction, what are you looking for by participating in Museum Connections? Have you developed a network of potential partners?
(G.M.) – We’re here to open up our potential for collaboration. Up to now, we’ve been concentrating on developing our network of locations, which we’ve greatly expanded. Our teams are now larger and able to manage external projects. Over the past two years, we have opened up our catalog to external partners. That’s what we’re looking for at Museum Connections, where we’ll find potential partners to continue developing our network.
Many thanks to Grégoire Monnier for his availability.
