At the Cerisy conference « Transformations of Cultural Policies », in June 2026, I built an online ABC of the words that were debated over six days. This is the story of how the object came to be, starting from a joke in the room, and of how a political intention finds its technical form.
A reflexive duo within the conference
From June 18 to 24, 2026, the Centre culturel international de Cerisy hosted the conference Transformations of Cultural Policies, directed by Jean-Paul Ollivier. I led a morning session on cultural mediation and carried, with Jean-François Marguerin, a reflexive duo throughout the week. Each morning we offered a synthesis of the previous day, and we could also step in during the discussions to put into perspective the imaginaries circulating behind the words being used, often without the speakers noticing them.
“You could call it Careful, it’s slippery!”
The idea was born during one of those discussions. Someone had just used the French expression “forces de l’ordre” (forces of order); I pointed out that we used to say “gardiens de la paix” (guardians of the peace), and that “forces de l’ordre” is not a legal term but a media term. By using it, we adopt a vision of the world without thinking about it, and that vision then shapes our actions, since we act according to the way we picture the world. The discussion was joyful, it made people laugh, and a neighbour sitting next to me whispered, as a joke: “Ah yes, you could call it Attention, ça glisse — Careful, it’s slippery!” The title was found before the object existed.
I first thought of putting up a board in the corridor, where everyone could come and write words. Then I told myself that, in all likelihood, people would not take part that much. The idea stayed in my mind, vague, for two days.
A conversation, then a night of making
On the fourth day, a conversation with Christelle Blouët, from Réseau culture 21, set everything in motion. We were talking about possible forms, and she told me how fond she is of ABC books, a form she practises readily. My first intuition sorted the words by themes, but that classification was too normative, it assigned each word to a single reading, whereas alphabetical order, through its very arbitrariness, places side by side words that nothing connects, and these neighbourhoods produce encounters. Above all, that conversation fed my desire to make the thing. This is often how desire is born, in an exchange where the idea you were vaguely carrying suddenly takes on a desirable shape, and you set to work because someone else, for a moment, believed in it too.
My first idea, though, was still quite simple, printing the words on A4 pages and handing them out the next morning, plain and simple. But as I drew up the list, the words came flooding in. Going back over everything that had been said since the beginning of the week, they came from everywhere, so thoroughly were the discussions shot through with shifts of meaning, and what was meant to fit on one or two sheets was going to require many more. I wondered how to proceed. Handing the lexicon out to the whole room meant hundreds of pages to print, and I could not ask that of the conference team. It was along the way, faced with this very concrete problem, that the solution came, building a web page and printing only access codes. Six QR codes fit on an A4 sheet, a dozen sheets would be enough, cut into small slips that anyone could pick up whenever they wished. A purely practical consideration was thus the starting point of what became, step by step, a sophisticated interface. The movement of desire also works that way, it moves forward from one step to the next, a material constraint opens a possibility you were not looking for, and by evening you find yourself designing far more than you had imagined in the morning.
That same day, I therefore started laying the foundations of the technical object. At dinner, before launching the final making, I went from table to table asking people for words which, in their view, had circulated and mattered. I wrote them down. I had my own point of view on what had been at play, but the points of view of others were needed too, because what matters is the meaning that circulates within the words, not the list that one single person would draw up. The first version was built that night.
Entries written as narratives
Each entry was written as a piece of research into the material of the discussions, finding out who had said what, in which context, with which tensions. The same word, depending on who spoke it, did not carry the same world; cooperation named sometimes the real relationship between people, sometimes the dressing-up of a networking scheme ordered from above. The entries are therefore not definitions, they relate the different meanings that ran through each word, with their debates and sometimes their antagonistic positions. This work also required factual verifications, the founding decrees of the French Ministry of Culture, reference texts such as the Faro Convention, the spelling of names checked against the list of participants. And it continued as the conference went on, I enriched the lexicon after the fifth day, then after the sixth, following what was being said.
Cerisy, where Oulipo was born
It is perhaps no accident that this energy came to me at Cerisy, a high place of French and European literary thought. The château has a history with the very forms I was handling without thinking about it. It was during a ten-day conference devoted to Raymond Queneau, in September 1960, that the future founders of Oulipo met there, that workshop which made formal constraint an engine of creation, and the alphabetical constraint of the ABC belongs to that family, an arbitrariness that stimulates instead of stifling. Roland Barthes came to Cerisy in 1977, for a conference held in his presence, the very year A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments was published, whose figures are arranged in alphabetical order so as to impose no order of meaning. Barthes, incidentally, appears in the gallery of figures of the ABC, for his Mythologies. I did not have this lineage in mind while making the object, I discovered it afterwards, and it delights me.
Feminism, a word that arrived two weeks later
The object went on living after the conference. I passed it on around me, people wrote to me, some offered words with their text already written, which I integrated as they were. Two weeks later, talking with students at another conference, devoted to artificial intelligence, in Germany, I realised that the word feminism was missing, even though, implicitly, many issues had circulated around that question during the Cerisy week. I added it. As the page states, anyone can write to me to propose a word or rework one. It is a living object, it now counts one hundred and thirty-four words, where I had imagined a dozen on my A4 pages.
A single web page, durable and carefully crafted
The object gathers a text presenting the approach, the ABC itself, an access by theme, a built-in search engine, the gallery of the cultural references invoked and the list of the people who spoke at the conference. I did in-depth work on ergonomics, so that consulting it is pleasant in every use, on a phone as on a large screen, in the conference room as at home, and so that each way of entering the lexicon, through a word, a letter, a family or a search, finds its path effortlessly. Technically, it is a single web page that embeds all its own code, with no server, no database, no dependency on any proprietary technology, which makes it durable. Sovereignty over the object is full and entire; the word sovereignty was, as it happens, called into question during the conference, and I suggest you go and look it up in the ABC.
Tracing common ground within diversity
At its core, the idea of this ABC is political, tracing common ground within the diversity of points of view, without smoothing them over. And this political need found its form in a technical object, because that technical object seemed the best possible answer to it, independent, durable, open to anyone. It is the same movement I put to work in the digital projects I accompany, where editorial design and technical choices flow from the political stakes of the project, and not the other way round.
The ABC can be consulted below, and is directly available at this address: www.benoitlabourdette.com/_docs/projets/2026/2026_colloque_cerisy
