In 2010, a museum and cultural center will open on Reunion Island, the Maison des Civilisation set de l’Unité Réunionnaise (MCUR). It will be the first museum built on the island entirely born out of colonial and postcolonial experiences. For the last three years, a team has been working on its cultural and scientific program and has organized events. The project has recently entered a new phase with the meeting of an international jury on May 14th, 2007. It proposed X-TU as the laureate for the architectural contest which used a spiral form as an answer. A former French colony, now a French department and a European region, Reunion Island had four museums, a museum of natural history built in the 19th century on the European model, the Musée Léon Dierx, a museum of modern art built in the 20th century around a selection of modern paintings left by Ambroise Vollard, a collector of Reunionese origin, Stella Matutina, a museum of industry around sugar cane in a renovated factory (1980s) and Villèle, a museum set in a former plantation. All these museums followed a European philosophy: educating the citizen around a collection or an industry. None sought to integrate the lives and experiences of Reunion society except as an aside in temporary exhibitions. The MCUR was not conceived around a collection, but rather around the desire and the will to offer a space of encounter, debate and interpretation. As a museum, it seeks to present and “represent” the lives and experiences of marginalized people: slaves, indentured workers, poor settlers, the processes of creolization and the multi-layered complex India-oceanic world. The objectives and philosophy of the MCUR rest on the analysis of the island’s history and of the history of the museum. Postcolonial theory, gender theory, psychoanalysis and visual theory offered tools to clarify the forms of mediation that will be used in the museum.