Raising awareness of cultural rights - Nantes métropole (September 30, 2022)
Taking ownership of cultural rights concepts and approaches through cooperative creativity
A small group of cultural players from Nantes, led by Véronique Guiho-Leroux, Head of the Publics and Cultural Citizenship Mission at the Directorate General for Culture and the Arts in the City, took part in the Programme Paideia proposed by Réseau Culture 21 (Christelle Blouët). As part of this training-action program, the Nantes-based players decided to organize an awareness-raising day on cultural rights, aimed at a wide range of local players in the cultural and social fields. The event took place on September 30, 2022, and was attended by 80 people.
With my agency Benoît Labourdette production, I contributed to the co-design and co-hosting of this day, on several levels:
- Proposal to integrate creative approaches (drawing, photo, video, podcast...) for the appropriation of cultural rights.
- Co-design of the day’s program.
- Transmission of creative animation techniques.
- Participation in the day’s activities.
- Creation and hosting of a mini-website resource for the day.
- Co-writing and layout of the day’s summary booklet distributed to 1000 professionals in the region.
- Technical control.
The mini-website
Find out more about the resources co-constructed during the day and how they were used.
https://www.benoitlabourdette.com/_public/2022_nantes_droits_culturels/
The day’s entertainment group
Day proposed and organized by the local Nantes “cultural rights” group:
- Véronique Guiho-Leroux, Mission Action culturelle et territoriale (Direction Générale Culture et Arts dans la ville - Ville de Nantes).
- Gaëlle Caudal, Mission partenariats de la Direction du Patrimoines et Archéologie (Direction Générale Culture et Arts dans la ville - Ville de Nantes).
- Ouided Ayad, Coordination projets associatifs (Direction Territoires et Projets - Acoord).
- Véronique Servage, Direction de quartier (Direction Citoyenneté et Territoires - Ville de Nantes).
In cooperation with:
- Anne Tignon, direction de l’inclusion sociale (Ville de Nantes).
With methodological, creative and technical support from:
- Benoît Labourdette, cinéaste, pédagogue, consultant innovation culturelle et numérique (Benoît Labourdette production).
With the support of:
- Charlotte Audollent (Direction Générale Culture et Arts dans la ville - Ville de Nantes).
- Fanny Michaud (Direction Générale Culture et Arts dans la ville - Ville de Nantes).
- Delphine Agoyer, Maison de quartier de Doulon (Direction Territoires et Projets - Acoord).
- Laurine Lambert, service civique, Maison de quartier de Doulon (Direction Territoires et Projets - Acoord).
The “cultural rights”, which derive from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a concept developed and defended by researchers, sociologists, philosophers, political leaders and actors of the cultural world. Present in a certain number of articles of law since 2001, the cultural rights aim at highlighting and formalizing, in order to be able to make them operative, the principles of a “cultural democracy”. To summarize it quickly, it is a question of each person being able to give value to his or her personal culture, in order to be able to exercise his or her citizenship: to express himself or herself, to defend his or her point of view, to create, to develop his or her practices, to have access to a cultural diversity, etc. Cultural rights operate in a much wider field than that of the strict cultural sector.
The notion of “cultural rights” is present in France in the laws NOTRe (2015) and LCAP (2016). It is carried by a delegation of the Ministry of Culture (General Delegation for transmission, territories, since January 1, 2021).
Paradoxically, cultural rights are difficult to implement in the cultural sector, which is traditionally rather attached to “cultural democratization”: one often defends the idea of the transmission to the public of works of art of the best possible quality, according to a principle of hierarchy of “cultural values”. Thus, the cultural rights can be lived by certain professionals of the culture as a dangerous dynamics for the Art, a tendency towards the amateur practices, which is not the case.
In my point of view, which is that of a practitioner/researcher in the cultural field, cultural rights are above all a practice, an exercise of democracy in the very methods of organization of the work, of the relation to the other and of the place of each one, the choices of programming, the methods of mediation and animation of workshops, the mode of territorial inscription of the cultural policy, etc.
I propose in this section concrete working methods for good practices of implementation of cultural rights, based on my field experiences, as well as a sharing of more theoretical reflections, in the framework of my own research on cultural rights.
I place myself in the filiation of thinkers like John Dewey. But cultural rights cannot be presented without mentioning Patrice Meyer-Bisch, Jean-Michel Lucas, Christelle Blouët, the “Fribourg Declaration”, etc.
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Raising awareness of cultural rights - Nantes métropole (September 30, 2022)
Co-design and co-hosting of a one-day event for Nantes’ cultural players.
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Working method
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