Creation as the energy source of cultural mediation

Cultural mediation is going through deep questioning about its professional identity. Beyond the legitimate claims for status recognition, I wish to affirm here what seems to me to be at the heart of the matter: shared creation is the driving force of mediation, and it is by fully embracing this creative dimension that the professions of mediation will find their rightful place.

What practice has taught me

For over thirty-five years, I have been inventing cultural projects with very diverse groups of people: autistic children, Roma teenagers, homeless people, very elderly people, students, prisoners, professionals from the social, educational and cultural sectors, artists, families, and “ordinary” people! In each of these contexts, I have always observed the same thing: what transforms people, what creates connection — to oneself, to culture and to others — what produces mutual recognition, is not the transmission of knowledge or access to pre-existing works. It is the act of making something together that did not exist before. A film, a text, an image, a podcast, an exhibition, or even simply an experience. The act of creating.

I have received just as much, if not more, in terms of artistic experience from all these creations made by people who did not feel legitimate, as from what I have received from creations by professional artists. When people are given the confidence to dare to express themselves, all human beings have an enormous amount to offer other human beings. That is the power of creativity. And one can be enriched by high culture, by popular culture, or by the culture of one’s neighbour, as long as space is given for it to be expressed.

This conviction does not come from a theoretical position. It comes from practice. It comes from moments when a planned project does not work and something else must be invented on the spot, for instance, when we allow ourselves to be surprised by what surpasses us and what we had not imagined before — which is the exact etymology of the word creation. My conviction also comes from careful observation of what happens when people take the risk of creating together. Creation is the energy source of cultural mediation. Without it, all that remains is relational logistics.

Ethics before technique, creation before transmission

Cultural mediation is a set of methods and techniques, but above all it is an ethics, a creative space that one gives — or does not give — to the other. I say creative because receiving is creating, it is being active. Cultural mediation is most often understood as a set of methods for transmitting culture, for sharing elements to help understand a work of art, for example. This view, although the most widespread, seems to me deeply incomplete, and even false.

As Jean Caune writes, “to focus on the phenomenon of mediation is to emphasise the relationship rather than the object; it is to question the enunciation rather than the content of what is enunciated; it is to prioritise reception rather than dissemination” (La démocratisation culturelle, une médiation à bout de souffle, PUG, 2006). If we take this proposition seriously, then mediation is not an act of translation — it is an act of creation. Creating the conditions for an experience to occur is a creative gesture in its own right, one that mobilises imagination, invention, risk-taking, and attention to the unexpected.

Yet it is precisely this creative dimension that the current professional debate on mediation professions tends to underestimate. Marie Evreux, in her practical brief “Mediation professionals: facing the challenges, staying the course” (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Spectacle Vivant, February 2026), provides a very accurate diagnosis of the environment in which mediation professionals work today: piling up of injunctions, loss of meaning, precariousness, and the need to reclaim the profession. Her “cultural relationship bingo”, which lists all the contradictory missions that mediators are asked to fulfil simultaneously, is a welcome piece of lucidity. She is also right to point out the historical construction of mediation “in the shadow” of artists and programmers, and to claim a zone of professional autonomy.

But I would like to take her argument further. For if we claim a zone of autonomy without clearly stating what we do within it, if we demand the helm without saying where we are sailing, we risk winning an administrative battle while losing what is essential. And what is essential is creation.

Mediation and cultural action: a distinction that reveals our hierarchies

There exists in our professional field an old distinction, rarely examined in depth, between what is called “cultural mediation” and what is called “cultural action”. This distinction, with its variations depending on institutional contexts, regional histories, and professional legacies, structures our representations far more than we realise. And it deserves our attention, because it contains in embryo the very problem I am trying to name.

In the most common representation, cultural mediation would fall under access to culture, under cultural democratisation: it would involve a work of “popularisation” of the artwork, of translating existing knowledge towards audiences who would not have spontaneous access to it. The mediator would then be a go-between, an intermediary between a legitimate culture and audiences to be won over. Cultural action, on the other hand, would designate something more ambitious: projects where artists engage in a creative process with participants, where social transformation and emancipation are at stake, where art is truly at work. Cultural action would presuppose the presence of “real” artists, engaged in an authentic creative process, capable of transmitting something that belongs not to the order of knowledge but to the order of creative experience.

I understand this distinction. It has its own internal coherence, and it has historically helped defend demanding projects against forms of mediation reduced to institutional communication or to occupational entertainment. It has served as a reminder that art, when it is truly at work, produces something other than entertainment or pedagogy. And it is true that when a writer who has read a thousand books and written a few invents a writing proposal, the framework they create can have a density, a rigour, an openness that a playful or formal exercise will not have. The artist who grapples with creation, who embraces their singular desire and translates it into forms, who intimately knows the resistances of the material they work with — that person brings something precious, and I do not deny it.

But this distinction poses a fundamental problem. It maintains, at the very heart of our field, the hierarchy it claims to transcend. By reserving the creative dimension for “cultural action” carried by artists, and by assigning “mediation” a role of transmission and access, it reproduces exactly the vertical logic of cultural democratisation that it contests elsewhere. On one side, those who create: the artists. On the other, those who transmit: the mediators. Cultural action would be noble because it is creative. Mediation would be subordinate because it is “merely” relational.

Personally, I make no distinction between transmission and shared artistic practice in my work. When I hire people to lead projects with me, they are always artists, or people I place in a position to create: I tell them they will create within my framework themselves, alongside the participants. Participants will feel all the more desire to create when they are in the company of mediators who are also creating and sharing that energy with them. Mediators do not supervise — rather, through their presence, they create a framework conducive to creation. And this has very powerful effects. Is it a mediation project, or is it an artistic cultural action project? It does not matter to me, because the only thing that counts is that there is shared creation (not necessarily “under the guidance” of an officially recognised artist).

Creation is in fact more alive when we free ourselves from the concept and the identity of “the artist”, which presupposes hierarchies that truly trouble me and run counter to my ethics. What is happening in the digital world confirms this anthropologically: there is no longer any distinction, thankfully, between “artists” and everyone else. Everyone has the right to express themselves and is legitimate in doing so, regardless of whether one is “professional” or “amateur”. Each person is recognised in their right to expression. The disintermediation that characterises contemporary cultural practices short-circuits precisely this system of hierarchies and prescriptions. This does not mean a levelling down at all, because each person has their own singular place, and everyone is complementary.

Mediators as creators

This means something very concrete: mediators must develop their own creative skills, and the confidence that goes with them. Not in order to become artists in the institutional sense — that is, people labelled by a specific recognition system who “make a living” from their creation — but in order to be truly capable of creating with the people they welcome.

For this is where the problem lies. If mediators are not themselves engaged in a creative process, if they have not had the intimate experience of what it means to risk inventing something, to face the blank page or the resistant material, then they cannot create the conditions for others to do so. They can organise, welcome, facilitate, but they cannot open that space of trust where creation happens, because they do not know from the inside what it requires. This is why, in the training courses I lead, particularly within the Expography and Museography master’s programme at the University of Artois, which I have been involved with for many years, I place students — future mediators — in the position of creators (which they often already are), so that they can experience first-hand that creation is the source of mediation. This is also why, in the itinerant projection creation workshops I have been leading for fifteen years, participants are creators of both the projection content and the mediation they will lead themselves. Whether the content is a short film they propose or a film they make themselves, all is well. And the audience that comes to watch the projection, the passers-by who join in — which means there are always more people at the end than at the beginning — through their movements and their gazes, their presence as a group in the city at night, also create the very existence of this projection; without them, it has neither meaning nor rhythm.

Bernard Stiegler, in his analysis of techniques as pharmakon (2004), reminds us that any technical device can be both remedy and poison depending on how it is used. The same pedagogical tool can, depending on the facilitator’s posture and the way it is implemented, be either emancipatory or normalising. The difference is not about the person’s status — artist or mediator — but about the quality of their creative presence, their capacity for invention in the moment, their attention to what emerges unexpectedly.

I have seen recognised artists lead workshops where they explained to participants how to do things “their way” — ultimately normalising workshops, where the artist reproduced exactly the vertical relationship they claimed to be challenging. And I have seen mediators without any artist title create extraordinary spaces of freedom, because they had that quality of presence, that capacity for listening and invention, that trust in the creative process. What matters is not the label — it is the practice.

What I am defending, then, is the development of a genuine creative culture among mediation professionals. Not as a “bonus” or an ancillary skill, but as the very heart of their professional identity. A mediator who creates, who makes films, who writes, who photographs, who invents frameworks, is a better mediator. Not because they become an “artist”, but because they know from the inside what it means to confront the material, doubt, and the joy of finding a form. And it is this embodied knowledge that allows them to open the same possibility to the people they welcome.

The created object as a third party

There is a mechanism I would like to make visible, because it seems to me to be the heart of what we do, and because it sheds light on why creation is not one tool among others but the very framework of mediation.

When two people are face to face — a professional and a participant, for example — there is always a risk of a power dynamic. The one who knows facing the one who does not, the one who proposes facing the one who receives. But when these two people make an object together — a film, a text, an image, a performance — the object becomes the site of the encounter. It absorbs tensions, it shifts gazes, it allows each person to invest themselves without feeling judged. The object serves as a third party between people.

Then, the value of making an object that becomes external to us is that the other person who appropriates that object — reads it, watches it, listens to it, touches it — is completely free, not trapped in the one-to-one relationship. And that object, once created, enters a community of similar objects. Someone who makes a film will encounter the community of other people who make films, whether directly, physically, or through social media. This presence to oneself, through the object that enters into relationship with other objects, inscribes social relations — that is to say, a sense of life.

This is not a marginal phenomenon; it is the beating heart of what mediation can produce at its most precious: the inscription of the person in a legitimate social space, through creation. All participants can see their works gathered in the same place. This contextualises, this inscribes the person’s creation in a legitimate social space. This is extremely important for the construction of the person for themselves, and also for the democratic effect of this artistic project.

The hierarchy that hinders

Why does this creative dimension of mediation remain so poorly recognised? Because it runs up against a symbolic hierarchy deeply rooted in our cultural institutions.

This hierarchy is old and tenacious. At the top, the artist, the creator, the one whose vision drives the project. Just below, the programmer, the curator, those who choose, who decide what will be shown. And at the bottom, the mediator, the one who “gets the message across”. Marie Evreux’s brief recalls that Judith Dehail has clearly shown how the “maternalising” representation of mediation betrays a conception of audiences as minorities and ignorant. I would add that it also betrays a conception of the mediator as the executor of a vision that is not their own, and therefore as not being a creator.

This hierarchy — artist / programmer / mediator — reproduces, within cultural institutions, the vertical logic of cultural democratisation inherited from Malraux: there would be a legitimate culture, carried by artists and selected by programmers, that would need to be “transmitted” to audiences through the mediation of mediators. This conception, which Serge Chaumier describes as “conservative” (La médiation culturelle, Armand Colin, 2017), remains the one shared by the majority of professionals and institutions.

Yet if we take cultural rights seriously — enshrined in French law since 2015 (loi NOTRe) and 2016 (loi LCAP) — then we must recognise that creation does not come down from above. Cultural democracy, as Patrice Meyer-Bisch explains, “presupposes the recognition of the diversity of cultural expressions and the active participation of all in cultural life, in contrast to democratisation, which imposes a legitimate culture from above”. It happens within the relationship. It emerges from the encounter between people who each bring their singularity, their history, their skills, their desires. The artist is not above the mediator, nor the mediator above the participant. All are engaged in the same process of making the commons, with different roles but without a hierarchy of dignity.

I am not saying that the specific skills of the artist or the curator are useless. They are precious. But they must be mobilised differently. In organisations that have undergone deep transformation, all skills are fully mobilised, but they are all the more beneficial when they have lost their power of domination. Each person’s respective skills unfold in a relationship of mutual enrichment, not in a hierarchical relationship. This is exactly what must happen in the cultural field.

A recent example illustrates what such a change of posture can produce. The exhibition “Sous la pluie, peindre, vivre et rêver” (In the Rain, Painting, Living and Dreaming), co-organised between the museums of Rouen and Nantes, experimented with an innovative curatorial model. At the initiative of the director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, a dual curatorship was established: a scientific curator and an audience curator, positioned at the same level of responsibility. This arrangement breaks with the traditional model in which the scientific curator decides alone and the audience department intervenes in a supporting role, after the fact. By placing mediation at the heart of the exhibition’s very conception, this co-curatorship gives greater weight to audience considerations and re-engages mediation teams, too often confined to a secondary role. It proved quite difficult with the Nantes museum, where the traditional model prevailed in practice and where mediation teams felt sidelined. This concretely illustrates what this hierarchy produces when it is not challenged. The director of the Rouen museum has since generalised this co-curatorship principle to all his exhibitions, establishing parity between conservation and mediation — which echoes what researchers such as Serge Chaumier have been advocating for a long time. This example shows that this is not an abstract ideal: institutions are already shifting the lines, and the effects on teams are immediate, in terms of recognition, engagement, and the quality of the experience offered to visitors.

Creation as a democratic process

If we claim to provide arts and cultural education, there must be art. And art means freedom, invention, imagination, discovery, transgression, experimentation, risk-taking, and so on. Otherwise, it is mere imitation, or a school-like approach with no artistic interest. Art is that powerful life force that will be embodied in the objects we create, which will then go out to meet other people and perhaps make them vibrate with that same power, that same strength, that same mystery.

This is why artistic creation echoes the democratic process: the creative and inventive contribution of each person to enrich the commons with what makes them singularly rich. The Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights (2007) affirms that cultural rights aim to guarantee everyone the freedom to live their cultural identity. In respecting the dignity of each person and their identity, and in openness to their expression, this is what we must work towards unconditionally.

Marie Evreux writes in her brief that we must “thwart normative frameworks by inventing myriad ways of doing”. I fully share this intuition. Hundreds of ways of doing can influence and enrich one another. They are harder to subjugate or break than a single framework reproduced ad infinitum. But these ways of doing, for them to have genuine power, must be ways of creating. Not of programming, selecting, organising, or raising awareness, but of creating, with people.

Inventing with people rather than transmitting towards them

The idea that an artist should come to explain to people how to do things their way is a bad idea, because everything must start from the participants’ desire, from the space opened up for them. If at some point people want, because it makes sense to them, to extend the encounter by working in the manner of the artist they meet, that is very well. But it will only be good from the moment it arises from their desire, because then they will, consciously or not, appropriate in their own way what comes from that artist.

It is our role as artists or mediators to create this commons, this substrate, this shared material that can welcome the singular expression of each person, weaving connections. If we want to normalise expressions, to make them more homogeneous, it means there is no more expression, therefore no more art, which disqualifies the entire project.

A genuine framework is not what constrains, but what authorises. Within the framework of an artistic proposal, people must feel authorised to create, to take the risk of being seen by the other. As Bernard Stiegler explains in Prendre soin (Taking Care, 2008), the capacity for attention is closely linked to the feeling of trust and cognitive freedom. Participation in a collective creation, even a modest one, always represents a personal risk. The question then becomes: how do we create sufficient conditions of trust for this risk to become possible?

Changing position to change practices

Marie Evreux raises an essential question in her brief: “From where should mediation be practised?” She questions the almost exclusive attachment of mediation to cultural institutions, and notes that the homogeneity of institutional affiliations naturally produces a homogeneity of practices.

I share this observation, and I would like to take it further. For the question is not only “from where to practise” but “in what relationship”. What produces the homogeneity of practices is not only the fact of practising from within an institution: it is the fact of practising beneath someone, beneath an artistic direction, beneath a programming project, beneath a top-down cultural policy. It is the subordinate position that normalises, not the place.

The question we must ask is this: in what framework can shared creation occur with the most freedom, the most power, the most meaning? The answer varies depending on the context. There are institutions where it is possible, because trust is given to mediation teams. There are independent collectives where it is possible, because the forms of organisation allow it. And there are contexts where it is impossible, regardless of people’s good will, because the symbolic hierarchy suffocates any possibility of genuine creation.

Joy as a compass

Marie Evreux’s brief concludes with an evocation of joy. The joy of doing one’s work, of cultivating the relationship. It is an important word. For joy is the sign that something real is happening. When people create together, when they take the risk of being seen by the other and that gaze recognises them, when they make an object that enters the commons, there is joy. This joy is not a mere bonus. It is the sign that the democratic process is working.

We can change the world, right here, right now, by creating respectful frameworks that authorise people to express themselves. This is a respectful and horizontal mediation, a mediation that is convinced it has as much to receive as it has to give. If we draw all the consequences from this, it means that it is not necessarily conservation or programming that should take priority in cultural establishments, but shared creation, the service rendered to people — or at the very least that a genuine balance should be struck between these functions.

Our mediation methods are not recipes to be applied repeatedly; they are working hypotheses to be adjusted according to contexts, audiences, and objectives. This epistemological humility, this recognition of the complexity and singularity of each situation, far from weakening our professionalism, strengthens it by making it more clear-sighted, more adaptive, more respectful of the people with whom we work.

The horizon for mediation professions will not come from a tutorial on good mediation, nor from a professional structuring, however necessary it may be. Nor will it come from the separation between those who create and those who transmit, between artists, mediators and curators. It will come from the cultivation of a shared creative practice — attentive, demanding, joyful — a practice in which the mediator is fully a creator, not by title but through their engagement in making, which in turn authorises participants to be so as well. It is there, in making together, that our most reliable compass is to be found.``