La Maison des Ailleurs, Literature museum in Charleville-Mézières, France

La Maison des Ailleurs occupies a three-storey pale-stone building with a red-brick leftmost bay, wrought-iron balconies and dark red double doors. Inside, the first floor where the Rimbaud family lived is left unfurnished, with bare walls and floors; each room evokes one of his places — Marseille, Paris, Brussels, London, Stuttgart, Java, Aden and Harar — through video projections, sound pieces and maps silkscreened on the floor.

The building was acquired by the municipality between 1999 and 2003 and transformed into a museum while preserving original wall elements. This renovation allowed Rimbaud's wandering life to be presented within an authentic historical setting.

The name comes from Rimbaud's urge to be elsewhere: each room is named after a place where he lived, from Marseille and Paris to London, Brussels, Stuttgart, Java, Aden and Harar. The first floor, the family's 120 m² flat, is left bare, with maps silkscreened on the floor and video and sound pieces by twelve artists. Temporary exhibitions on poetry and the visual arts are also held here.

The ground floor holds the Arthur-Rimbaud museum shop and the Marseille room; the first floor, the apartment the Rimbaud family occupied, is left unfurnished and used for projections and sound pieces, while the second floor covers the travels abroad. A small inner courtyard leads to a studio housed in a former outbuilding, used for residencies of artists or poets. The house is visited as an extension of the Arthur-Rimbaud museum a few metres away on the same quai.

The museum preserves fragments of the original wall papers and deliberately avoids reconstructing period furniture. This creates an honest space that reveals the material history of the house itself rather than presenting an idealized reconstruction.