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Inalco Hosts the Collaborative Mural "Dorica Castra"
Dorica Castra is a collaborative mural created between November 2025 and May 2026 at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, home to the National Museum of the History of Immigration. This work emerged from a partnership with the museum and the discovery of the temporary exhibition Migrations and Climate, as well as the imaginations, stories, and beliefs held by each of the participants. This exhibition highlighted the challenges and tragedies caused by climate change around the world, while emphasizing communities’ ability to cope with and adapt to these challenges, often through collective strength and the mobilization of shared resources.
At the initiative of Inaco and in collaboration with the museum, a group of students formed spontaneously, bringing together students from different departments and academic levels, alongside the artist Alix Le Boucher. The group came together through drawing to create this collaborative mural, nearly five meters long, which conveys a message of commitment to all Inalco audiences.
The dorica castra is a literary figure of speech that involves repeating, at the beginning of a word, a group of words, or a clause, the same sound that ends the preceding element. This title highlights how the students—who are linguists themselves—have internalized the exhibition’s messages. This literary device also echoes the collaborative creation of the mural and emphasizes its collaborative nature:
We took turns sharing our ideas, drawings, words, and paintbrushes, continuing the sentence that someone else had started before us.
Amira, Hanna, Maya, Marie, Rania, Ruuth, and Salomé.
The mural brings together images that follow one another, flow into one another, and reflect one another, evoking climate-driven migrations rooted in the history of displacement, which resonate with the past. It addresses issues of transmission, solidarity, and adaptation raised by environmental changes and climate transitions.
The mural was unveiled at an opening reception. The event began with a speech by Julien Vercueil, Inalco’s Vice President for Outreach and Environmental Responsibility, followed by Lieko Lelong, Deputy Director of Audience Development at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, and then by the artist Alix Le Boucher.
A guided tour was then led by the students involved in the project, followed by a social gathering bringing together the artists, the coordinating teams, and Inalco students and staff who had come to get a sneak peek at the artwork.
The mural will be on permanent display for an indefinite period in the hallway leading to Inalco’s lecture halls (2nd floor).
