“Other times, other customs,” we explain at GHU Paris (new name of Sainte-Anne hospital). Gone is the pornographic rifle fresco that hung in the medical interns’ rest room. A new frieze “emphasizing parity” was inaugurated on April 26 in the famous Parisian hospital.
“This new work replaces a fresco dating from the 1990s, whose iconography was debated in light of the ministerial decree of January 17, 2023, requesting the removal of frescoes of a pornographic or sexist nature in guard rooms,” explains- we within the GHU. And for good reason, in January 2023, the Ministry of Health asked establishments housing this type of frescoes to remove them in consultation with intern representatives.
“Unfaithful to the hospital’s policy of zero tolerance towards sexism”
It is now a done deal at GHU Paris. “Witness to a time when these frescoes represented an outlet, allowing interns to distance themselves from a sometimes difficult daily life, its farcical and obscene iconography today seemed anachronistic and unfaithful to the hospital’s policy of zero tolerance towards sexism », Explains management.
For the creation of this new timeline, GHU Paris launched a call for projects by consulting representatives of interns, doctors representing different disciplines but also communication experts. Result: a colorful and modern fresco. “What I really liked about the call for projects was this revisit, the fact that politically things had changed,” explains the artist Virginie Gaubert, alias Virgen, at the origin of the new frieze. The old fresco was, however, saved in the archives of the establishment “for the sake of history”.