The National Museum of African and Oceanian Arts closed in january 2003. Its collections were transferred to the future Quai Branly Museum of Arts and civilizations from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Various survey campaigns carried out since the year 2000 explain this new episode of the eventful history of the Palais at the Porte Dorée. From the threefold point of view of the museum institution, the personnel and the visitors these surveys throw some light on the closure process of a museum belonging to the national patrimony and on its new destiny. The study is focussed on the seemingly contradictory relations between rupture and continuity, closure and durability, heaviness of the past and new look at museums. The future creation of a national city of the history of immigration illustrates these paradoxes.