Conference: “EAC and cultural rights: convergences to be identified and implemented”

How can cultural rights be a tool for better implementation of artistic and cultural education projects? And how we can identify convergences between the two, and how one can help the other, or the other can help the other!

As part of the Territorial meetings “Artistic and cultural education & Territorial cultural projects” (Foix, February 5, 2025), which I co-constructed, organized by l’Association des Maires Ruraux de l’Ariège (AMR09), l’Office
Central de la Coopération à l’Ecole d’Ariège (OCCE-09) and l’UFISC.

Full summary of the meeting.

(photograph : Marie-Cécile Rivière)

Unedited transcript of the conference

I’d like to talk to you about the link between artistic and cultural education and cultural rights. How can we identify convergences between the two and how can one help the other or the other help the other. So, it’s pretty quick, 15 minutes, so I’m going to share with you a point of view, a direction of thought that’s mine, which is obviously open to debate. Obviously, I’d like to give you a few notions. Artistic and cultural education, for me - and once again, this is my point of view - is in the spirit of what we call cultural democratization, a priori, with the question of encounters with artists and works of art, the three pillars of EAC, practice. But practice is democratization, meaning that we’re going to offer people the chance to practice artistic skills proposed by artists, generally, and then knowledge, which is more academic. So, that’s it, for the EAC side.

I do it very, very quickly and I think it’s great. And now, I’m going to give a broad outline of what I mean by cultural rights, knowing that it’s a concept that can sometimes seem a little theoretical. It seems to me to be a very practical concept, but one that draws on other sciences. In fact, I can put it like that.

We’ve seen this morning that quite a few people are aware of what cultural rights are, but I’ll take the liberty of defining them in my own way, because everyone has their own way of explaining what regulates respect for human dignity. Because that’s what cultural rights are all about. To begin with, they’re based on dignity. Various declarations of human rights since 1948. And then it became formalized. There’s one formalization that’s not the only one, but there’s one that’s a bit of a reference today. It’s called the Fribourg Declaration.

In fact, it’s about considering culture in its anthropological sense. So it’s already completely different from artistic and cultural education. The word culture in artistic and cultural education is not the same as the word culture in cultural law. In other words, in cultural rights, culture in the anthropological sense, i.e. what constitutes us. What I like, where I live, where I come from, the music I listen to, the social networks I frequent, for example. Well, all that is culture, it’s what constitutes me. And the idea of cultural rights is to respect people’s culture.

Respect, but respect who? We, the institutional players, the players financed by the common good, well, our mission is enshrined in law now, in France anyway. In two laws, in 2015 and 2016. Cultural rights are cited, but you should know that cultural rights in themselves are not in themselves an article of law. They are cited in laws, but in themselves, even the Fribourg Declaration, it’s a sort of copy-paste, if you like, of rewording articles of law, but it doesn’t have the force of law, the Fribourg Declaration.

So, if we ever want to oppose cultural rights, for example, I don’t know, if we find that a place doesn’t respect people’s cultural rights, well, we can’t mobilize cultural rights in themselves, but what underlies them. So it’s a bit special in legal terms. In short, cultural rights mean that we have to respect people’s culture, their identity, for example, their cultural identity in all its singular, non-normative aspects. So that people themselves can recognize the social value of their own culture.

In other words, if someone, I don’t know, who speaks French badly, but who speaks other languages very well, for example, is judged and possibly excluded or stigmatized because he doesn’t speak French well. Well, their cultural rights haven’t been respected, and they don’t feel entitled to value their own culture. And I believe that our role in our institutional roles, no matter where we are, is to frame things. Well, it’s to respect people so that they themselves can recognize the personal and social value of their own culture.

And from then on, they feel entitled to participate in the life of the city. That’s what it’s all about. If I don’t recognize the value of my own culture, it’s absolutely impossible for me to take part in the life of the city, because my culture has no value in the social arena. So I can’t participate in the social space. And so, in my opinion, that’s it. And cultural rights bring democracy. Cultural democracy.

And I’d like to clarify this nuance with cultural democratization. It’s Malraux, in fact, it’s the great works of humanity that are made accessible to everyone, the works that are judged to have cultural value, but this is culture with a capital C. And cultural democracy is rather a space where we enrich each other’s respective cultures.

And that’s where cultural rights come in for a lot of criticism, because you can say, ah bah yes, ok, it’s cultural relativism, it means that everything is worth the same, in the end, so in the end our work is a little bit trampled underfoot, in a way, what about the excellence of artistic work, etc.? In fact, in my opinion, cultural rights don’t say that everything is equal, but they do postulate the idea of diversity and mutual enrichment, regardless of one’s culture or another. We change dynamics and energy, if I may say so, and so, finally, there is, it seems to me, so I’ll give you two examples, if in a place like this, for example, a group of children arrives, as a group of children arrived earlier, who are noisy, and they get argued with, they get yelled at because they’re noisy. Well, in terms of, as they say, cultural rights, their rights have not been respected.

So, you could say, yes, but if they made noise and disturbed the people who were watching the show in that hall, they themselves didn’t respect the rights of those watching the show. In fact, their rights were not respected in the sense of, were we sufficiently interested in them and their journey? Did we share enough with them the meaning of the codes of this type of venue or not? And how, in the way we welcome them, because cultural rights are also about how we welcome them, how we move towards something. So, for me, it makes me think a little bit about the shoelace too.

So, how do we do all this? I wanted to highlight a few methods. Today, for what we’re sharing together, I’d like to bring in a notion that comes rather from psychoanalysis. I’m talking about cultural rights, but cultural rights are more of a legal arsenal, a paralegal arsenal. And in fact, in putting cultural rights into practice, we’re going to mobilize things other than cultural rights. These are not methods. Cultural rights are rather ways of assessing and looking at things. But they don’t really provide solutions as such. It seems to me that other skills need to be mobilized to put them into practice.

And so I’d like to talk to you about what we in psychoanalysis call the symbolic third. What makes it possible for people to meet, as we’re trying to do today? Well, there’s the dual relationship, what we call the dual relationship. In other words, I ask you to do something, I give you instructions, for example. And that’s a dual relationship, a power relationship. And that’s quite complicated, because in the end, the person has to obey. Obey, in a way, what they’re told.

The third party... It’s this instance, this object that stands between us and enables us to meet better. In other words, if we say, for example when we told you earlier, we’re giving you an instruction, write something, write a proposal, then you write it and put it on line, in fact you write what you want. So it’s a third party between us. And this third party allows us to meet. You see, it’s not direct.

So for me, this third-party dimension is very much linked to the practical dimension of artistic and cultural education. But how do we go about proposing practice? So for me, the tool is quite important and central. If I tell people how to do it, well, I... It seems to me that I’ll remain in a dual relationship. If, on the other hand, I share my tools, I give them tools, markers, paint, I propose a framework.

Within this framework, which is indeed proposed by the artist, so it’s the artist’s workshop, if you like, the framework that is proposed, well, people have a framework, and if within this framework, they are free in a certain way to do what they want, well, I, as an artist, and I know this because I am one too, I set up a lot of actions with the public, I’m going to receive what they’re going to invent in my device.

So, you see, the fact of giving the tool allows people to do things their own way, it seems to me, we’re in a practice, but we’re in a practice of cultural democracy, you see the nuance between democratization, basically, I give the instructions, you have to do as I said, because I’m the artist, I have the skill, etc... or else, I share my tools, I share the knowledge, I share the experience, I share the knowledge, or else, I share my tools, and people appropriate them in their own way, and I receive, and perhaps, as an artist, I receive things, and I’m also transformed by what happens. But then, it’s really an energy, and it seems to me that the question of the tool... It’s also at the heart of restrained pedagogy, the question of the tool at the center.

We make a newspaper, the aim is to make a newspaper, and then everyone, in a complementary way, will do different things. And I believe that, precisely, it’s no longer so much that everyone does the same thing - that would be democratization - but that everyone does things with their own skills, enriching the collective. So it seems to me that this vision and practice of cultural rights can shed light on artistic and cultural education.

I’ll give you an example of a photo workshop, which we could have proposed today, but we had so many things to propose, that I often have people do. I suggest that they each take a photo, with little instructions: there has to be a hand in the photo, and then a theme, but in the end everyone takes a photo as they like. And then people put the photo online, with the famous QR code that you used, and then we find ourselves, it takes what, 5-10 minutes, not even, to make a photo, there’s an intention, and we find ourselves with the photos. All the photos taken by the people. We’re a big group. With a group of 10 or 15, it works better.

And we’re going to look at the photos together, with a slightly unusual instruction: the person who took the photo isn’t allowed to talk. But the other people who look at the photo tell them what their photo looks like, what they see in it, what it evokes in them, and so on. What’s really interesting here is that there’s been an artistic practice, the creation of a photo. But the practice of looking together means that the people who took the photo receive different looks, and people see many different things in their photo.

And as a result, it’s quite surprising, because people can often see philosophical things, etc., that I didn’t see at all. I took my own crappy photo, my own little photo. And I say to myself, that’s a load of crap. They see things I didn’t put there. But in fact, those things are there. And in so doing, thanks to the eyes of others, I’m going to learn about my own photo. I’ll be enriched by other people’s eyes.

Whereas, and it’s actually very strong what’s happening, and maybe little by little, it’s not that I’m going to be valued. We often talk about valuing young people. Personally, I don’t agree with that. What’s important is how people progress. The problem with valorization is that it postulates a hierarchy of things. But it seems to me that the journey is the most important thing. It also means realizing that art belongs as much to the creators as to the spectators. And that we each have our own role to play.

And in this practice, we spent a lot more time looking together. And that was a very important moment, rather than making. And as a result, it seems to me that, for example in a restitution, and I’ll end on the role of the artist, very often during the restitution, we’re actually going to explain and justify what we’ve done. So it’s the other way round. This is my photo exercise. But in fact, what I mean is, we reduce it to intentionality. It’s like the question the author wanted to ask. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not the point, really. What’s important is what you’ve received and how you can share it. It can be interesting, why not, but that’s not what art is all about.

When it comes to art, I refer a lot to John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosophy. Art as experience. He says that art is not an object. Art is an experience. And it seems to me that in artistic and cultural education projects, there’s the word education. So, people are at the center. Education is all about people, of course, if it’s carried out properly. And in cultural rights, people are also at the center. And that’s what we need to implement.

In a restitution, there is often the problem of the result. There’s been a whole workshop and so on. Then there’s a restitution, and the result is shown. The problem with this is that the moment of restitution is important: it validates and establishes. And as a result, there are the guardians, the parents, the teachers, the financiers, the town mayor, and so on. So everyone’s under pressure. It has to be right.

And in an EAC project, there’s a lot at stake for the artist too. The DRAC advisors are there. So it’s his identity as an artist too, since he led the workshop. So often, we end up with workshops where the artist finalizes the work. If it’s a painting, a photo, a film or even a show, he’ll arrange the works made by the participants, so that it’s of value to everyone and to the institution. But in so doing, the educational dimension, the path of the people, the participants, find themselves dominated by the power of the artist, a power that is greater than their own. So we’re no longer in a democracy. And in so doing, we’ve drifted, it seems to me, towards an institutional production that’s there to valorize everyone. But it seems to me that we’ve completely perverted the very texts of artistic and cultural education. And there was never any bad intention.

And so, I have a proposal, and I’ll end on this note, which is to document the processes, to document what’s going on, to really take note of what the progression has been, to take photos, to keep diaries, and so on. To never, as an artist, intervene in the work to arrange it, etc. Never in your life, to put a ban on that, to accompany people and, when we return the work, what we return is the path we’ve traced.

And then, finally, the work exists, of course, there’s a final result. But the restitution is the journey. And that’s where we get into the educational process, you see, it seems to me. And once again, it’s all up for debate. I share my point of view. So, it seems to me that cultural rights can help us, because in the end, we’ll be refocusing on the person, on education and on the person’s journey, and not on some kind of artistic domination which, a priori, is not what we want to do, so thank you for your attention.