Tucked under the Tour Eiffel on the last great site on the banks of the Seine, the new postethnographic muse´e du quai Branly will incorporate the works of eight contemporary Aboriginal artists into its very structure. As the musee enjoys the personal patronage of President Chirac (after whom it may well come to be named), this is a creation like the Centre Pompidou or the Louvre Pyramid. It will be noticed. How wonderful to have such a cultured government!

And such a potential audience of Parisians. As many as a million a year are expected, for whom "museum-going is such a casual activity that a man may go at lunchtime and not even tell his wife when he comes home in the evening".

Such are the hopes of the musee's president, Stephane Martin, during a recent conversation in Paris. This president is also a very French appointment. Because such a vast preponderance of funds for culture come directly from the government, he is a bureaucrat rather than a museologist - a former magistrate in the revenue court, indeed, who rose to become Head of the Office of Philippe Douste-Blazy when he was Minister of Culture. But he's been executive chairman of the board of the musee since its inception in 1998, bringing the institution's team together even as the philosophy and the architecture by the renowned Jean Nouvel were being developed. Here, the building would be finished before its users got to have a real say in its planning.

And this is an arts centre as much as a museum - replacing the august musee de l'Homme and the musee des Arts d'Afrique and d'Oceanie, with their dusty
300,000-object collections, with a 200-metre long floating bridge of a building that will show core pieces suspended in clear glass vitrines as beautiful things rather than as ethnographic curiosities. But there will also be two or three temporary exhibitions at any one time, often the work of outside curators investigating those 300,000 objects, performances and films from non-European sources in both indoor and outdoor theatres, and a constant flow of academic study. Three research and administrative buildings support all this. Two will have generically 'Third World' decoration; the third is already known as 'The Australian building' because of its Aboriginal aspect for the million visitors a year expected to enter the musee beside it.

This determination to give non-European art its place in the Parisian sun began when the Louvre displayed 120 masterpieces alongside its da Vincis and Lorraines. Stephane Martin admits that giving status to the city's migrant communities was a factor behind this decision. Well, there aren't many migrant Aborigines. But, as one of the eight selected artists, Yirrkala's Gulumbu Yunupingu, said at last December's announcement of their names, "These are my stories in Paris forever, when I am gone; from the Yolgnu people of this planet for all the people no matter what colour or tongue they are speaking".

She'll be joined on the walls in perpetuity by John Mawurndjul from Arnhem Land, Paddy Bedford and Lena Nyadbi from The Kimberley, Ningura Napurrula and Tommy Watson from the desert, and Judy Watson and the late Michael Riley from urban Australia.

For more information visit www.quaibranly.fr

Image: In the run-up to quai Branly's opening, this hanging of Alaskan masks at the Muse´e National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oce´anie was trialled in 2002 as a model of how the ethnographic can become aesthetic in the future. Alaskan Masks, 2002, Muse´e National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oce´anie 6 November
2002 to 20 January 2003. Courtesy muse´e du quai Branly.