Not judging people’s digital practices

Non-judgment and non-hierarchization as conditions for mediation.

Judgment damages the very connection that mediation seeks to build. It goes hand in hand with a more subtle hierarchization, which places the practitioner above those they accompany. These two movements close what they claim to open. To loosen (…)

Presence and social experience

Cultural legitimacy put to the test of lived experience.

How does our sense of legitimacy shape our cultural experience? Let us shed light on the social and political dimensions of artistic presence, beyond mere aesthetic reception. Inner legitimacy as a condition of experienceThe question of (…)

When Cultural Professionals Question Their Approaches to Adolescents

Reflections on a day of professional cross-fertilization.

An interprofessional day organized by the Réseau Jeune Public au Centre at Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux on November 19, 2025, which I co-designed and co-facilitated, brought together one hundred and fifty professionals. Here is an (…)

Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Actors: The Laws of Creative Transformation

When the precise definition of artistic desire meets algorithmic power.

Cultural institutions that passively wait without embracing artificial intelligence could see their neighbors transform in just a few months. The difference would depend neither on resources nor training, but on dynamics that I believe are (…)

The red jars

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’27s, 2021).

Man domesticates nature. For good or bad reasons? Maybe it’s a little more complicated than we thought. Hints for a philosophical reflection

Rethinking youth culture

From democratization to cultural democracy.

Cultural institutions often fail to reach youth. To reverse this trend, we must move from cultural democratization to cultural democracy, recognizing the diversity of practices. The Eternal MisunderstandingIt is striking to note that Hesiod, (…)

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

Dans le cadre des Rencontres territoriales “Artistic and cultural education & Territorial cultural projects” (Foix, February 5, 2025).

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 (…)

Six Fears About AI, Six Shifts in Thinking

Responding to defensive rhetoric with a philosophy of transformation.

Surveillance, relational isolation, environmental destruction, robotic warfare, existential threat, billionaire power: the dominant discourse on AI accumulates perils. These concerns deserve examination. But their very formulation prevents us (…)

The Time of Creation

Rethinking art beyond mastery.

Is art object or relation? Let us explore a vision of creation where the work resides in shared experience rather than in technical mastery. Thus are also revealed the multiple temporalities of the creative process. The Work as RelationWhat is (…)

Professional meeting “Public participation”: presentation by Benoît Labourdette

Interview of Benoît Labourdette by Jean-Yves de Lépinay (11’37s, 2020).

Sharing examples of audiovisual creation workshops conducted in the spirit of cultural rights: moving from “participation” to “interaction.”This trust we choose to put in others is a risk we take, it changes us. We take the risk of being able (…)

Why does our training change nothing?

Possible talks on pedagogy and transmission, for teaching teams, training organisations, artists who teach, and companies.

A team leaves a training day convinced, and three months later nothing has changed. It is not a problem of motivation, it is a problem of method: validation is not transformation. I have been working on this question for thirty years, with (…)

The connected audience

Rethinking cultural participation through building connections.

Cultural attendance does not depend on communication but on the bond woven between people and cultural offerings. This prior relationship determines the meaning that each person finds in participating. Beyond the Logic of Supply: Connection as (…)

Building, Not Valorizing

What the collective gaze does that valorization cannot.

In supported creation workshops, whether they fall within cultural action, arts education, or therapeutic mediation, people often speak of “valorizing” the participants. This word seems to me a trap. To valorize implies the possibility of (…)

Creation and Virtual Reality

Critical thinking and creative methods.

Building a critical thinking of the stakes of Virtual Reality (360°) films, through practical application and creativity.This article was originally published in 2020 in « Les cahiers de Louis Lumière n°13 ».Virtual Reality has been (…)

“Cultural participation”: interview with Benoît Labourdette.

Interview with Benoît Labourdette (4’39s, 2020).

Video presentation of Benoît Labourdette’s approach to the democratic dimension of cultural action.

Dilapidation of resources in supply logic

For a democratic revolution of cultural practices.

Faced with the crisis in the cultural sector, it is urgent to shift from a top-down supply logic to a culture of connection and listening, inspired by digital practices. Traditional supply logic versus the digital modelThe cultural field is (…)

The living being

A film by Benoît Labourdette (5’27s, 2018).

Discovering in the materiality of the world that a work of art is not what it seems.

Pedagogical Innovation

From method to posture, reinventing the act of teaching.

Pedagogical innovation is not limited to a catalog of new techniques. It resides, in my view, in the ability to invent, here and now, a learning situation adapted to the heart of the relationship. Rethinking TransmissionPedagogical innovation (…)

Cooperative Narratives

Creating polyphonic narrative devices to transform academic knowledge into living and operative knowledge.

How can we overcome the limits of academic narrative to create truly shared knowledge? A concrete experience of collective writing devices that restore narrative power to participants. The form of narrative as epistemological matrixIn her (…)

Why the power to act is so often experienced as a transgression

Two photographic creation workshops at Le Rize in Villeurbanne, with the local cultural rights groups of the Paideia programme (Réseau culture 21).

I ran these two workshops on 1 July 2026, as part of the “Developing the power to act” module of the training course for organisers of local cultural rights groups. Asked to represent the power to act in a photograph, the teams mostly (…)

“Creative digital practices and critical thinking training”: conference by Benoît Labourdette

Atelier Canopé 86 - Poitiers. Study and training day “EAC at the service of the development of critical thinking”.

Participative conference to illustrate how the training of critical thinking can effectively pass by the means of artistic creation. To inaugurate the study and training day “EAC in the service of the development of critical thinking”, for (…)

The question of criteria

Hierarchies, forms of mind and creation, in school and at university, in the age of artificial intelligence.

What do we measure when we evaluate? Artificial intelligence brings back to the surface an old question, that of the function of criteria in school and at university. This question reaches deep into what learning means, into what institutions do (…)

For a Permanent Cultural Transformation

Moving beyond political infantilization to rebuild our institutions.

Faced with budget cuts in arts education, cultural actors appeal to those in power. This posture of supplication reveals, in my view, a dead end. It is time to think differently about our action. The political choice to miseducateProfessional (…)

Visio-corporal metamorphoses: participatory artistic action at Louvre Lens

Creation of fantastic images using video projections on the body.

A pictorial account of the shared poetic creation of visio-corporeal transformations, proposed by Benoît Labourdette, with painting, drawing, video projectors, photography, cell phones and digital tools, at the Louvre Lens on Saturday, December (…)

Work and Mastery (2)

Distinguishing work from mastery in mediation-based creation.

Work (as a process by which people are transformed through doing) and mastery (as the illusion of control over what one produces) are two distinct logics. Distinguishing them seems central to me for the practice of mediation through creation, (…)

School is already a society

What this observation changes in the work of cultural practitioners in schools: they do not come merely to bring art into the classroom, they come to shift, for a while, the place each person occupies.

After almost every artistic intervention in a school, teachers say they have discovered their students in a different light. This is not the magic of art at work; it comes from a shift in the places people occupy within the society that a (…)

Cultural Rights in Light of Personal History

At the beginning of my journey as an engaged cultural actor.

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 (…)

A new season with 220 voices

The story of a morning on young people’s cultural practices, facilitated for the 220 staff members of the culture department of Laval, on 2 September 2026.

The “Cultures pour tous” department of Laval and Laval Agglomération entrusted me with facilitating its back-to-work gathering, a full morning devoted to the cultural practices of 15-25 year olds. 150 people were expected, 220 came, from the (…)

Artistic Legitimization, Cultural Rights, and Construction of the Individual

Between horizontality and the need for recognition.

Artistic legitimization, between traditional hierarchies and new digital forms, questions individual and collective recognition. By intersecting Dewey, Latour, and cultural rights, let’s explore how art and the mastery of symbolic objects (e.g., (…)

Evaluating Arts and Cultural Education from the Artist’s Perspective

Review of a course given at INSEAC: conceptual and methodological tools for cultural professionals.

On January 15, 2026, as part of the CNAM module EAC104 “Building tools to evaluate ACE projects: qualitative and quantitative survey methodologies in living-labs,” I led a distance learning session for students in continuing education at INSEAC (…)

Cultural democratization, cultural democracy: situated definitions

Professionals who aim at the same horizon nonetheless define the words of their trade differently. I propose to read this divergence as a sign of coherence between each person’s position, their words and their acts.

In cultural policy, we debate the definitions of cultural democratization, cultural democracy and cultural rights as if a single one would eventually have to prevail. I propose another reading. Each of us builds our definitions from the position (…)

Inquiring in the spirit of cultural rights

Territorial diagnoses, evaluations, dissertations, theses. So that the way we study a cultural situation puts into practice the cultural rights it takes as its object, and how to go about it.

A territorial diagnosis, an evaluation or a dissertation is about people, about their practices and about what they say. When we claim to work in the name of cultural rights, we have to bring them to life in our method, and not only describe (…)

Don’t look in the place for what’s already in your head

In a creative workshop, when you arrive somewhere with an idea in mind, you stop seeing what is around you. I suggest reversing the usual order, letting the place you are in give you ideas, and allowing little time, because time mostly gives us the chance to put up barriers.

When I invite a group to make a film, I almost always give the same instruction before any other: start by finding a place, and don’t decide anything until you have found it. People who arrive with an idea spend their time looking in the space (…)

“On the beach of my imagination” : video installation in the hospital

Immersive device: permanent video installation at the Jacques Monod Hospital in Flers (Normandy - 2022).

Accounts of the issues at work in an art for health project. Every morning, the big wall of the waiting room of the hospital in Flers lights up by itself. Video images of nature, calm and serene, are projected there all day long. It is a space of (…)

What defines us as human beings

Cultivating empathy and sensitivity in the age of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has now occupied our daily lives since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. How can we produce critical thinking about what is happening to us? That is to say, how can we think for ourselves, without taking refuge (…)

Definition of Cultural Mediation

An ethics of relationship in service of singular experience.

Cultural mediation is often reduced to a set of transmission techniques. Here I propose a definition that places the person at the center: an ethics of relationship creating the conditions for a singular experience. Mediation as ethics, not (…)

Artistic Extractivism

A theatre made elsewhere, which comes to help itself to places and people.

Building a show in a rehearsal room, transporting it and coming to play it in the homes of people one takes no account of follows a logic of extraction known, in ecology, as extractivism. I propose to examine this way of working, which seems so (…)

Creating with people

Methods of cultural mediation for shared creation.

This text brings together the principles that underpin my approach to cultural mediation. They are not rules. They are reference points, shaped by twenty-five years of practice with very different audiences – autistic children, Roma teenagers, (…)

Philosophy and pedagogy

For a profound practice of pedagogy.

Philosophy and pedagogy are deeply interconnected, as our worldview influences our educational approach. If we consider that humans are intrinsically eager to learn, pedagogy becomes a way to nurture this natural desire rather than imposing (…)

Towards the cultural experience

Essay, by Emmanuel Vergès

In the construction of cultural proposals, focus attention on the lived and shared experience. Short essay on the philosophy of action and the function of art.Benoît Labourdette’s work, between By my window and street projections, makes me (…)

Training a company in participatory mediation

Staging the reality of the encounter, not only the performance.

Theatre and dance companies are now asked to do mediation work, and many artists experience it as a chore tacked on to their art. Drawing on the support work I carry out with companies, I argue here that the relationship with audiences is a field (…)

MJC Dole: “Image Education: Popular Education for the 21^st Century?”

Lecture by Benoît Labourdette for proposals for philosophical and practical tools of thought on the challenges of digital and images. The aim is to collectively equip themselves to carry out popular education initiatives in the 21st Century in (…)

Build antifragility for cultural projects

Methodological proposal.

What methodology should be adopted to build cultural projects that have the capacity to tame uncertainty and thus become more deeply rooted in their objectives? Methodological proposal, based on the thesis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the (…)

“Territorial approach, participation, youth and digital technology”: interview of Benoît Labourdette by Serge Saada (52’, 2021)

Observatory of cultural mediation in the social field.

As part of the Observatory of cultural mediation in the social field, Serge Saada interviewed Benoît Labourdette on the impact of the proliferation of digital images on young people and the public in general. Here is the soundtrack of the video. (…)

Receiving, or the difficulty of doing nothing

The mediator’s invisible time and the energy of welcoming.

By the end of the day I am tired, with a physical tiredness, even though “I have done nothing,” because I have spent the day placing myself in a state of receiving. I said this sentence one day to students I was training, and it took me years to (…)

John Dewey : an inspirer of cultural rights?

Sharing my interest in an inspiring personality.

The notion of “cultural rights” is increasingly present in the debates within the cultural sector. They are seen by many as being at the heart of the issues and processes of change in the field of culture. But they are controversial, their very (…)

Reinventing cultural projects with youth?

Proposal of questions.

While public cultural action aims to reach people in their great diversity, it is clear that it is often difficult to mobilize youth. However, young people (from children to young adults) have an intense cultural consumption, especially online in (…)