Musée des Mille et Une Racines, Museum in Cornimont, France

The museum is an art space housed in a former textile factory that displays around 1,000 wood sculptures crafted from roots, branches, and tree trunks gathered from nearby forests. The works fill roughly 480 square meters and take the form of figures and creatures shaped from the collected natural materials.

Michel Maurice, born in 1937, gathered roots, branches and tree trunks in the forests around Cornimont for over five decades, shaping them into roughly 1,000 sculptures. He installed the collection in a former textile factory, where the museum opened to the public. The German version must not state 57 years, since the sources give more than five decades.

The museum's name, "A Thousand and One Roots", refers to the roughly 1,000 pieces of wood Michel Maurice gathered in the surrounding forests. Audio naturalist Marc Namblard recorded forest sounds that play in the rooms, so the visit links the carved figures and animals to the woods they came from.

The museum is located near the forest and is easily reached on foot from the town center. It is helpful to wear comfortable shoes since the exhibition is spread across multiple levels and spaces throughout the building.

Some of the sculptures contain found objects embedded within the wooden structures to tell fairy tale stories and legends. This combination of natural wood forms with incorporated items creates unexpected narratives throughout the collection.