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Your institutional project is coming to an end, or no longer matches the reality of your activity. Your local authority is rethinking its cultural policy, its relationship with young people, its territorial dynamics. Or your team is going through a transformation (a merger, a change of leadership, falling funding, a digital shift) that needs to be thought through collectively rather than endured. It is for these situations that the agency designs custom-built support.

This work produces structuring documents: an institutional project, a collaboratively built state of play, a white paper, a shared framework. Their strength comes from the way they are developed. The diagnosis is built with your teams, not in their place; the orientations are formalised and defensible before your governing bodies and your funders, because the people who will have to carry them actually wrote them. What remains often exceeds the documents themselves: cooperation methods that your organisation keeps after we leave.

To achieve this, collective intelligence is practised at every level (governance, teams, audiences), and participatory artistic creation serves as an instrument for getting people talking where conventional meetings fail. Benoît Labourdette designs and leads the process, with the eye of a cultural practitioner rather than that of a consulting firm.

A few recent assignments give the measure of this work.

Collaborative review of film and media education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (ALCA, 2025-2026). Full methodological support for a region-wide consultation for the Agence Livre, Cinéma et Audiovisuel: design of the collective intelligence process, development of the collaborative digital platform, co-facilitation of consultations bringing together some twenty professionals over four months, co-writing and co-editing of an eight-chapter publication, design and co-facilitation of the regional presentation day at the MÉCA in Bordeaux. Read the story

National project for the future of audiovisual media in libraries (French Ministry of Culture, Images en Bibliothèques, CNC, 2024-2026). Membership of the steering committee of this national action-research programme, in which Benoît Labourdette carried the political dimension of the work: leading the “Cultural policy” hearings with elected officials’ associations and national stakeholders, presenting their synthesis at the national conference at the BnF, and facilitating the collective writing workshop that produced the advocacy statement addressed to elected officials. Read the story

Also: the White Paper on cultural decentralisation; the « Éducation aux images 2.1 » action-research programme in Île-de-France; consultancy and training with the Observatoire des Politiques Culturelles; the national conference « Cultures et politiques de la jeunesse ».

You want a project or an event that genuinely involves its audiences instead of summoning them as spectators: a creation shared with the residents of a city, the visitors of a museum, the audience of a cinema, young people, so-called hard-to-reach groups, people in care settings or far removed from cultural institutions. Perhaps you have already tried to get these audiences to participate, without success: making that participation happen where conventional formats fail is one of the agency’s constitutive skills. Organisations also come to us to renew an existing event whose format has worn thin.

The project is designed, produced and delivered by the agency, and participation is not a communications add-on: it is the very principle of the work. Its artistic standard is what gives it its power. These projects are always conceived and directed by Benoît Labourdette’s artist’s eye, which sets them apart from participatory formats without formal ambition, which audiences see through. The agency has invented formats that have become references in the field (the Pocket Films Festival with the Forum des images, La Fête du court métrage with the CNC, the “Par ma fenêtre” project during lockdown) and works at every scale, from a workshop for ten people to a collective creation for several hundred.

Conception and artistic direction are carried by Benoît Labourdette; production and facilitation by the agency’s teams, sized to each project. Projects in the social, educational and care fields (mental health, disability, child welfare) rest on lasting institutional partnerships and on the « Pocket Films Empathie » programme, founded with the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron.

Among the projects delivered: the Pocket Films Festival; La Fête du court métrage; « Par ma fenêtre »; « Métamorphoses visio-corporelles » at the Louvre-Lens, a participatory artistic action co-led with young mediators from the École de la Deuxième Chance; « La machine à voyager dans le futur » with Cultures du Cœur, a touring programme of digital creation workshops in the social sector; « Sur la plage de mon imaginaire », a contemplative video installation at Flers hospital; the living museography of Le Silo; « Mémoire du sport dans la Grande Guerre », the participatory creation of a photographic exhibition; « Filme Tout Court » in Villetaneuse.

Your teams or your network need to build skills on a subject where theoretical knowledge is not enough: leading creative workshops, supporting audiences in their digital practices, understanding and passing on cultural rights, integrating artificial intelligence into a profession. What you are looking for is training that transforms practices, not an information day.

Our training works through doing: participants experience the formats before learning to lead them, and it is this lived experience that durably changes their relationship to the subject. They leave with concrete, reproducible tools that they have tried out themselves during the course.

Each course is designed with the commissioning organisation, starting from the participants’ real situations. Benoît Labourdette has been training professionals for thirty years (La Fémis, universities, the CNFPT, professional networks, training bodies in the cultural sector) and regularly co-builds courses with the organisations that host them.

Among the courses designed and led: the course « Les outils, jeux et ateliers d’éducation à l’image » with Images en bibliothèques; the “Développer le pouvoir d’agir” workshops within the training of local cultural-rights group organisers (Paideia approach, Réseau culture 21); the « Culture, jeunesse et numérique » course with the Observatoire des Politiques Culturelles; « Apprendre à voir et à entendre » for the DRAC and DAAC of Pays de la Loire; the course « L’Intelligence Artificielle et la création » for teachers.

You regularly bring professionals together and you want those sessions to produce something other than minutes. You need to build a common position on a subject that divides people or exceeds each of them: a shift in the profession, a controversy, a shared project. You want to consult a network, a profession, audiences, and you want that consultation to lead to real proposals. Or you want to establish, over time, a cooperation dynamic between actors who barely know each other.

In all these cases, the criterion we set ourselves is the same: what has been produced must go on being useful once the process is over. The work leads to a formalised output (publishable recommendations, a charter of practices, a fully built project, an edited synthesis), and participants leave with methods they can use again.

It is the expected deliverable that shapes the process, not the other way round. We alternate proven facilitation methods (rotating workshops, open space, arpentage or shared close reading, structured controversies, collective writing) with digital tools developed by the agency, today multiplied by artificial intelligence, which put the group to work in real time and between sessions: contribution platforms, shared mind maps, immediate transcription and editing of what is said and written. These methods are documented publicly in Methods for facilitating collective intelligence, where you can consult them before contacting us.

Three recent examples show the variety of scales and forms.

The living museography of Le Silo (Le Mérévillois, Essonne, 2026). Methodological support for the project of the association Le Silo, housed in a 1907 grain silo: rather than freezing the history of the place in a conventional museum, building with residents, artists and the territory’s institutions the form that will share its experience. A cycle of public contribution sessions, backed by a digital platform developed by the agency, where everyone writes during and between sessions. Read the story

An advocacy statement written by twelve people in one afternoon (BnF, 2026). At the national presentation day of the national project for the future of audiovisual media in libraries, facilitation of a collective writing workshop: in two hours, a dozen professionals produced the complete first draft of an advocacy statement addressed to elected officials, put online and shared with them that same evening. Read the story

The ALCA Nouvelle-Aquitaine consultation (2025-2026). Twenty film and media education professionals mobilised over four months, through the interplay of facilitated sessions and a contributory writing platform, leading to a jointly written eight-chapter publication. Read the story

Also: the AI monitoring committee of the Forum des images (2024-2025) and its closing webinar; the « cultural rights » writing and creation seminar, run as an open space; supporting young people and professionals in taking the floor; the giant digital brainstorm.

Artificial intelligence has entered your organisation without being invited: some people already use it, others refuse it, and no common position exists. You have to decide what your organisation does with it, says about it and passes on, without giving in to either excitement or panic.

The support works through practice. Your teams handle the tools instead of listening to a lecture, and come out able to make real, reasoned professional use of them. On that basis, an institutional position is built collectively: a framework for use, governance, a discourse towards your audiences. Organisations that wish to can extend this work with creative and mediation programmes using AI, aimed at their audiences.

Benoît Labourdette has been designing and delivering projects with artificial intelligence since its public emergence, in creation, mediation and production, and facilitates monitoring committees on its stakes (creation, ethics, professions, education). This double position, practitioner and researcher, makes it possible to hold together the effectiveness of uses and the building of critical thinking, which are too often treated separately.

This work has unfolded, among other places, in the European expert committee on artificial intelligence, education and artistic creation of the Genshagen Foundation; the AI monitoring committee of the Forum des images; « CinémA.I » at the Studio 13-16 of the Centre Pompidou; Tumo x AI - Creative journeys into AI; « Fabriquer les récits de la culture avec l’intelligence artificielle », a training day for a local authority’s cultural department; and « Intelligence artificielle et création : enjeux et pratiques ».

You need a digital tool that genuinely serves your project: a platform for exchange between your audiences or your members, a cooperation space for a network, a professional tool fitted to your activity, a digital heritage strategy for your archives and your content. Or you need films (documentaries, institutional presentations, trailers, edited recordings, podcasts) that escape the usual formats.

Tools and films are delivered turnkey, but they are designed upstream with you, as devices in the service of your project and not as mere technical objects. Our platforms and custom tools are built with free and open-source software, hosted with full sovereignty, designed to last, to be taken over by your teams and to evolve with your project: the Pocket Films Festival was able to carry its ambition because its custom tool grew with it for six years, and it is this living conception of tools that the agency has practised ever since. Our films carry the same demand for consistency between what is said and how it is made: “Droit à la parole !”, a documentary on democratic organisation in a progressive school (2026), was made using a method that gives children a democratic place within the film itself.

What sets the agency apart is that it brings together, at its core, strategy, creation and technique: the same eye conceives the device, shapes its uses and carries out its production. Thirty years of audiovisual production and twenty years of web development allow the agency to commit its responsibility from design to delivery, and then in supporting uses.

Among the works delivered: the « Azimut » platform for the MPAA; the collaborative platform of the ALCA Nouvelle-Aquitaine review; the contributory platform of Le Silo; the « Collège des médias » platform for Périfééries; “Droit à la parole !”; the films and podcasts for the Afnic Foundation; the trailers of the Festival International de Films de Femmes.

You are organising a study day, a professional gathering, a conference, an internal seminar, and you are looking for a talk that genuinely feeds your audience’s thinking, grounded in practice rather than in a synthesis of other people’s ideas.

Each talk is built for your context and your audience, and prepared with you: your situation, the live questions your audience is facing, what the day should leave them with. It draws on thirty years of practice and on a continuously published body of research (research and innovation, resources), including the book “Défendre la culture autrement : méthodes pour demain” (2026). And because all those brains gathered in one room can produce more than listening, talks can be extended with participatory formats that put the room to work. Talks are given in French and in English, in France and internationally.

Some recent talks: « La culture autrement : postures et méthodes pour demain » for the Cultures du Cœur network; « Publics : comment le numérique redessine le rapport au spectacle vivant ? » for Chaillot Augmenté × TMNlab; « Santé mentale, jeunes, images : de quoi parle-t-on ? » at professional gatherings; « EAC et droits culturels »; and the video lectures in the Talks section.