Making Room for Adolescents: Rethinking Our Approaches in Cultural Action

Cultural action and mediation with adolescents challenge the foundations of our practices: between framework and transgression, between physical presence and digital practices, what place is there for horizontality?

Two models of cultural policy

Cultural rights, now enshrined in French legislation (NOTRe law in 2015 and LCAP law in 2016), establish a fundamental distinction between cultural democratisation and cultural democracy:

• Cultural democratisation refers to the legacy of André Malraux: access to humanity’s great works, a culture that descends towards audiences. Many cultural facilities were built according to this logic, as evidenced by their very architecture.
• Cultural democracy, on the other hand, is based on more horizontal exchanges, recognising the diversity of practices. As Patrice Meyer-Bisch explains in Les droits culturels, une responsabilité politique (Observatory of Cultural Policies, 2008), « cultural democracy presupposes the recognition of the diversity of cultural expressions and the active participation of all in cultural life, as opposed to democratisation which imposes a legitimate culture from above ».

This distinction is not merely intellectual: it implies radically different professional approaches in supporting young audiences.

The report by the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE), “Towards Cultural Democracy” (2017), emphasises that cultural policies must integrate these participatory approaches to truly strengthen citizen participation. However, mediation practices with adolescents remain largely shaped by the top-down model of cultural democratisation.

A framework that enables rather than constrains

Making room for adolescents first requires adults to shift their own positions. Mediation professionals must be able to move, to modify their own stances to create this space of freedom. This question often crystallises around transgression: how do adults, who maintain the framework, welcome shifts, deviations, unexpected and potentially transgressive proposals from adolescents?

This inquiry leads back to the very notion of framework, too often confused with a disciplinary device. Take the example of an artist working in a classroom where teachers wish to remain “to act as police”. This type of presence represents the opposite of a secure framework. It is a device that, contrary to what one might think, is profoundly destabilising for young people, because it introduces constraint, the possibility of sanction, which triggers the inhibition of the biological mechanisms of learning, as the body shifts into a reflexive protective mode. Disciplinary logic opposes any cognitive possibility of learning. As Bernard Stiegler explains in Prendre soin (2008), the capacity for attention is closely linked to feelings of trust and cognitive freedom. Cognitive resistance, this ability to resist one’s reflexive thinking developed by psychologist Olivier Houdé, can only unfold in an environment of trust, without fear of judgement.

A true framework is therefore not what constrains, but what enables. Within the context of an artistic proposal, individuals must feel authorised to create, to take risks before the gaze of others. Participation in a collective creation, however modest, always represents a personal risk. The question then becomes: how do we create sufficient conditions of trust for this risk to become possible? Consequently, transgression changes its nature: it is no longer something to be combated but rather welcomed as an integral part of the creative process.

Recognition through naming and documentation

The question of digital heritage and recognition of collective creations raises essential mediation issues. When participants take photographs, make videos or create any other work as part of a workshop, noting their first names and associating them with the works produced is not an administrative detail. It is a fundamental recognition of their creative identity. This can take time, as sometimes people do not dare to identify themselves, out of a sense of shame. And maintaining a constructive framework for them means precisely accompanying them, among other things, to dare to expose themselves, without fear of being judged. What this produces is recognition of their creation, which gives them a powerful psychological experience.

Without this nominative recognition, the person who created is not identified as the author of their work. Yet these are genuine collective creations, even when they occur within an educational framework. Under copyright law and French legislation, works must be attributed. This legal obligation covers a deeper issue of dignity and cultural rights. As Patrice Meyer-Bisch reminds us, « every person has the right to have their cultural identity respected in the diversity of its modes of expression ».

This question of naming opens onto that of documenting projects, the processes of cultural actions. To document is to give ourselves the means to create narratives. These narratives serve a dual function:

1. These narratives allow participants to recognise the journey they have accomplished, to remember what they have been through. Often, lived experiences fade in memory; documentation allows them to be reactivated, to give them a lasting existence.
2. But these narratives also serve the political sphere: elected officials need something other than attendance figures to understand and defend cultural policies, as do institutional leaders, partners and even parents.

Dominique Cardon emphasises in Culture numérique (2019) that « algorithms shape our access to information by privileging certain formats and certain sources ». Textual narratives remain the most powerful vectors of transmission in the digital ecosystem. Elected officials and institutional leaders cannot invent these narratives: they need cultural professionals to construct and share them.

Digital technology as a living environment

Digital technology is neither good nor bad in itself. It has become a living environment. One cannot be abstractly for or against digital technology: it is the environment in which a large part of our lives now unfolds. The same reasoning can be applied to artificial intelligence. This reality demands that we face contemporary cultural practices head-on: we all have cultural practices through digital means. We listen to music, watch films, performances, dance. We can even practise these arts through digital tools.

Usage surveys show that TikTok, often criticised, is primarily used for educational purposes by adolescents. This platform deserves more nuanced attention than the a priori judgements it generally provokes. My article « Et si on changeait de posture ? » published in L’Observatoire des politiques culturelles (no. 60, 2023) precisely documents this necessary change of perspective among cultural professionals.

“Trends” on TikTok illustrate this creative dimension well: they consist of music on which users can create and film their own choreography in just a few clicks. Tens of thousands of choreographies respond to each other, forming artistic palimpsests, accelerated histories of art. This massive cultural phenomenon deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed outright. It testifies to a creative vitality and a desire for artistic expression among young people who use these tools.

The anthropological transformation of the spectator’s position

TikTok represents the first social network that integrates a complete and accessible creation tool. What changes in anthropological terms regarding the position of people who use this platform is the awareness of an immediate creative potential. A user can be a mere spectator, but they know they can become a creator with a single click, if they choose. This does not mean they systematically activate this function, but the possibility exists, immediately available. Their status is therefore that of a potential actor, not a mere spectator.

In a traditional performance venue, spectators do not initially have this type of potential position. This anthropological change deserves consideration in reflections on cultural mediation. In the lived reality of young people, the position has changed. This possibility of watching, creating and broadcasting corresponds precisely to what Jean-Luc Godard described in the 1970s as the ideal tool: being able to make films freely, being able to share them with friends.

As Walter Benjamin reminds us in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), techniques of reproduction freed art from its function as a tool in the service of tradition, which allowed it to access a form of cultural democracy. Current digital platforms extend and amplify this historical movement of democratising the means of cultural production. To deny this reality is to cut oneself off from understanding the contemporary cultural practices of adolescents.

Resizing the place of cultural institutions

Cultural practices through digital means are now extremely developed. Young people devote considerable time to these digital cultural activities: listening to music, watching videos, creating content, playing video games, participating in online communities. What traditional cultural institutions offer—theatres, museums, cinemas—represents only a tiny fraction of their daily cultural practices.

Cultural professionals are not THE culture for adolescents. They constitute one segment of it, sometimes important, but most often extremely minor. This awareness is in no way devaluing to the work of cultural actors. It simply allows us to better situate the real place of cultural institutions in the contemporary cultural ecosystem, profoundly transformed by digital technology. As Bernard Lahire notes in La Culture des individus (2004), « cultural democratisation also involves the invention of new spaces for encounter between works and audiences » (at the time, the term “cultural democratisation” covered both notions, democracy and democratisation).

Twenty years ago, this digital ecosystem did not exist in its current form. The cultural practices of adolescents were structured very differently. This rapid and profound transformation implies rethinking cultural action missions, not by abandoning the artistic and educational ambitions of institutions, but by accepting to work within an infinitely more diversified cultural landscape, where cultural legitimacy is primarily constructed through paths other than those of traditional institutions. Accepting this reality constitutes the first step towards more horizontal cultural action practices, more respectful of the cultural rights of adolescents, and ultimately more effective in their capacity to create authentic encounters with the arts and culture.