'Les Flâneuses’ results from curatorial research carried out by curator Francesca Zappia within the plethoric collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris, which focused on the contested notions of copies, appropriations and quotations of artworks. Drawing on art and design objects from the nineteenth century to today, the author shows how artwork reproductions can be considered as objects with a cultural value of their own and be regarded in the same way as the originals.

The book follows a spatial structure. Guided by an interview between Francesca Zappia and Juliette Pollet, curator at the Cnap, the reader walks through an imaginary and deliberately anachronistic museum. The rooms devoted to the Antiquities, the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the modern and contemporary periods bring together more than 300 artworks and forge new links between them. Throughout the chapters, the reader also meets the artists Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Aurélien Mole and Matthew Darbyshire who, each in their own way, open up additional perspectives of research.