Cultural Rights in Light of Personal History

The question of cultural rights has long shaped my commitment, well before the term came to light. Through my story, I attempt to show how a living cultural democracy rests on recognition, diversity and sharing, and how digital technology reinvents this collective aspiration.

At the origins of a commitment: before the words, the actions

A few years ago, emmanuel vergès, a figure in cultural rights, made this enlightening remark to me: “But you, in all the activities you’ve undertaken, you’ve always been working from the perspective of cultural rights, even if you didn’t name them as such”. Indeed, my first public cultural activities date back to 1988, nearly twenty years before the Declaration of Fribourg (2007) which came to sanctuarize the notion of cultural rights. While this declaration is part of a long lineage of advances since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, it is this declaration that was able to formulate in the clearest and most constructive way the foundations of a renewed political vision of culture.

These foundations rest on values and postures, both individual and collective, that place human dignity at the heart of cultural practice. And of course, I was not the only one working in this direction. This approach today bears a name: cultural democracy. It rests on the simple and powerful idea that culture is what constitutes us intimately. Consequently, the greatest service one can render to the democratic space is to guarantee respect and recognition for what constitutes each individual, because it is from this soil that the most fertile interactions for society are born.

This vision immediately opposed the dominant model of “cultural democratization.” The latter, carried by a top-down logic, postulates the existence of a corpus of “great works of humanity” that should be disseminated to the greatest number to “create commonality.” My own initiatives, such as organizing monthly short film screenings, went against this paradigm. By opening the doors wide to diversity of expressions and origins, my challenge was not to reinforce a professional system with its codes, but to create spaces of mutual enrichment where everyone, including the public, had their full place.

The foundational experience: breaking the boundary between author and spectator

Very quickly, in these screenings I facilitated, the process became entirely collaborative. I would propose a theme for the following month, and participants were free to simply come watch films, to bring works they had created, or even, and this was the heart of the project, to create their own films on the given theme. We were at the beginning of the 1990s, audiovisual creation tools were far from being as accessible as they are today, which is why I also offered technical support for making these future works. It was therefore a true cultural democracy in action: everyone could contribute freely, but also and above all, was actively invited to become a creator, to be supported in their gesture and to share it on the big screen.

This principle of participation did not exclude encounters with more professional productions; on the contrary, it nourished them. The spirit was that authors, whether amateur or experienced, systematically accompany their works to dialogue with the public. This circulation of speech and perspectives created a rare collective intelligence. The diversity and richness of what emerged from these screenings, which took place for nearly ten years at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University, still earn me glowing feedback today, many years later, particularly from film professionals who recognize that these moments durably opened their own perception.

What marked minds in this experience was not so much the diversity of professional productions presented, but indeed this radically different way of envisioning the relationship between spectator and author. It was a permanent invitation to “become an author,” to use another expression often employed by emmanuel vergès. I then continued the same type of activities within my professional activities, founding the Pocket Films Festival with the Forum des images in 2005 (dedicated to creating films with mobile phones, at the moment when cameras appeared in phones, ten years before they were permanently in everyone’s pockets), or The Shortest Day (the national short film festival, an event open to screening all works, including amateur ones, like the music festival) with the National Center for Cinema and Animated Image in 2011.

It is precisely this paradigm that is now magnified by social media dynamics. Preceded by blogs, platforms like TikTok are not just sharing channels; they are true audiovisual creation tools, both sophisticated in their possibilities and simple in their usage, which have generalized this potential to be both spectator and producer of culture.

At the sources of refusal: the quest for justice and rejection of hierarchies

If I try to trace back to the origin of this approach, which was already mine as an adolescent when I organized screenings at home and helped my friends shoot their films, I don’t find a theoretical explanation. What I find is an instinctive and deep rejection of all systems of domination. This domination begins insidiously through hierarchization. On what objective criteria can artistic works be classified? Who composes this alleged “caste of good taste” that arrogates to itself the right to define the legitimate and the illegitimate? This is where what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible” comes into play, a distribution of places and competencies that, very often, excludes on principle.

This questioning has always inhabited me. I have always aspired to total diversity, to radical openness, to unconditional respect for journeys and sensibilities, without denying my own tastes. I have always had the intuition that what was happening on the margins, far from the spotlights of majority culture, was no less essential than what was celebrated in broad daylight. It is therefore from a sentiment of indispensable justice that my practice was born, much more than from reading theoretical texts. My schooling partly in a new school, then university, certainly open, contributed to this, but I believe the deepest source is a primal feeling, one could retort that it is itself cultural, but I feel it as natural.

From childhood, for example, I did not feel at all in my place in gendered identity assignments; I could not be a “guy,” without emotions, violent and speaking loudly, because I did not see in it the intimate truth of people, but inclusion in a system of domination that scared me, because I saw it as setting aside the interiority and richness of each individual. I therefore found myself rather isolated, because I was not playing the social game, which is almost always a game of domination. Once I arrived at university, the social space was, finally, no longer carceral, everyone could make their own way there. The doors of social life opened wide for me there.

For the world to function harmoniously, each component must be able to express its specificity and enrich others with it. This is the very principle of biodiversity in the natural realm. We humans evolve in a cultural regime that we ourselves make evolve, this is our distinction from other animals. And this regime, if it claims to work for the common good, which should be its ethical purpose, must guarantee the flourishing of singularities and guard against the temptation of normalization. As philosopher John Dewey emphasizes in The Public and its Problems (1927), democracy is more than a political system; it is “the idea of a form of community life in itself, carrying a liberation of the potentialities of its members to a much greater extent than other forms of association could do”. It is in diversity that the common makes sense, while uniformization is only a violence that generates suffering and abuse of power.

The digital horizon: cultural democracy in the age of artificial intelligence

The digital universe in which we are now immersed offers us tools of unparalleled power to concretize this vision. The quasi-infinite possibility of sharing, of connecting knowledge, narratives and creations, allows us more than ever to “create commonality” from our irreducible diversities. The algorithms themselves, in their capacity to weave links between heterogeneous elements, can serve this project, and generative artificial intelligences open even more dizzying perspectives in this matter.

Today, cultural democracy is no longer an ideal confined to local experiments; it is a tangible reality, a force at work on a global scale. Contemporary tools amplify and accelerate the recognition of each individual’s legitimacy to contribute to the global cultural conversation. The challenge is no longer so much to enable expression, but to organize listening and cultivate the collective intelligence that can be born from it.

I believe that cultural democracy is not an objective to be achieved, nor a fixed model; it is a process, a path, a vigilance. It is not decreed, it is experienced, built, negotiated daily, in the most concrete practices as in the most abstract reflections.

Thus, the fight for cultural rights continues and adapts. It is not only about defending the right to participate in cultural life, but about actively shaping a world where culture is perceived and lived as a permanent dialogue, a collective construction where each voice, each story and each perspective is an indispensable resource for our common humanity. Cultural democracy, far from being a completed project, is only at the beginning of its potential expansion, if we support it.