"Faces of Joan" includes three different and complementary places distributed in the space of the centre and allowing the visitor to choose methods of visit that are more or less thorough. The Promenade, the Great Gallery, the projection Room, each place functions as a unit but at the same time belongs to a whole.

for adults and children, a book of images

The reception of visitors happens in the Promenade. They discover there an accumulation of representations of the heroine in various epochs, as well as the life of Joan on a small screen: the "golden book" is intended for adults and children to remind one of the way in which the illustrated books of the twenties, the thirties and the fifties proposed idealised images of the character.

Fort of Bourlémont, Lorraine. Photo J.M. Bodson

The Great Gallery and its permanent exhibit attract the visitor into another world. The visitor becomes witness; he/she begins a path in a universe of sound and light inside a large book of images. There too the exhibit is composed of different spaces that mark out his/her route. In the Street of Portraits, the lit Cabinets, the Room of Kings (motionless theatre where only shades and lights move), the Street of the cavalcade, the Court of Justice, it is the historical figure that is presented, from the fifteenth century, together with political tensions, changes in this society in transition, as well as what is representative of this time in the long river called "the Middle Ages". Joan belongs to the end of this long Middle Ages, at the hinge of modern times. She carries with her this time of transformation. In the Great Gallery, Joan is placed back into the ensemble of this medieval time, her modes of representation and thinking. It is the historical figure that is used as guiding thread.

Photo J.M. Bodson

audiovisual

In the projection Room, audio-visual equipment helps the visitor meet the one called Virgin Joan and the multiple faces that posterity gave her. They are the landscapes of the "Country of Joan", this Lorraine that was for a long time a "ground of danger", which is used as support for this evocation, presented in black and white on a large screen. The words of historians, writers, and poets talk about the child, the girl, the lawsuit, death. They also describe the multiple judgements that posterity will formulate in this respect. The other dominant figure in the audio-visual presentation is that of Charles VII. The second panel of the triptych presents the text of the King as a meditation of the prince who takes over, as he is talking to himself. The audio-visual presentation mixes on a large screen fixed and animated images. It opposes contemporary black and white photography of sculptors and landscapes with the treatment on a black background of ornamental and coloured scenes lit in miniature.

Theatre du Peuple. Bussang Vosges. Photo J.M. Bodson

It also involves the presence of actors throughout the whole scenario. Not only through voice off but also in photographs and play. One finds these actors on two sites of the Vosges equally charged with meaning: for "the lawsuit" in the fort of Bourlémont, near Domremy and for the debate "the judgement of posterity" in the Theatre of the People in Bussang.