Artistic practice, digital technology, collective intelligence and a shared research practice serve as the common method for all the projects that the agency Benoît Labourdette production designs in cooperation with local authorities, cultural venues, artistic teams, professional networks, schools, companies, social sector organisations and healthcare settings: support and consultancy, participatory art projects, exhibitions, training courses, events, films and professional tools. The digital tools we develop are themselves instruments of collective intelligence: tailor-made, sovereign and lasting applications that create bonds between people, equip cooperation and leave traces that become heritage.
You run an organisation; you are responsible there for audience engagement, programming, training or a specific project; you carry the cultural policy of a city, a department, a region. And a question is on your mind: the desire for an ambitious artistic event or creation, genuinely participatory, that involves your audiences or your residents rather than summoning them as spectators; an institutional project to be refounded; a team to be mobilised around a transformation, that of artificial intelligence for example; a cooperative dynamic to be sustained over time; a professional gathering, conference or seminar, where you want every person present to become a contributor; a film education programme to be developed further; a film to be made; a digital tool to be built; a scattered and costly use of digital technology to be brought back under control. The agency responds to these situations with tailor-made approaches.
These proposals are of two kinds, each nourishing the other:
This demand for consistency between values, project and methods rests on a conviction that Benoît Labourdette has put to the test for more than thirty years: people, organisations and territories already hold most of what they need in order to transform themselves, provided they are given the framework and the methods to work on it, refine it and anchor it over time.
This spirit can be recognised in the professional gatherings that the agency designs with its partners. A professional day, a conference, a biennial can be built so that every person present makes a genuine contribution: speech circulates beyond the podium, what is developed there is collected and published, and the participants leave with methods they can use again. This is how, among others, the interprofessional day on the place of teenagers at Équinoxe, National Theatre of Châteauroux, which brought together one hundred and fifty professionals, and the Participatory Creation Encounters of the Théâtre de la Poudrerie, whose programme the agency co-develops, were designed.
All the agency’s projects are documented as they unfold. This documentation constitutes a genuine research practice, carried out at the heart of the project, with the teams and the participants: we observe with precision, we analyse, we reflect together on what is being lived. It leaves traces, and these traces become material for living evaluations, for political accounts that show decision-makers and funders what really happened, and for lasting resources that your teams can draw on long afterwards. These are singular deliverables, co-constructed with the participants: what has been lived and learned does not evaporate, it becomes a support for what comes next.
Digital technology has been at the heart of this method for more than thirty years, not as a technical service, but as an instrument of collective intelligence. The Pocket Films Festival, founded with the Forum des images in 2005, was able to carry its very high ambition because a professional digital tool, developed as needs arose, made it possible. Today, these tools work within the cooperative schemes themselves: mind maps built during sessions and projected, transcriptions and syntheses reworked with artificial intelligence, written or photographed contributions shared online by each participant, thanks to applications that are very simple to use and hosted in a sovereign way. Each scheme thus leaves digital traces that remain with the teams and the participants: they become heritage, and contribute to people’s identity and to the value given to what has been developed together. Most organisations, on the contrary, live with a disorderly, costly, fragile and non-sovereign use of digital technology, made of standardised tools that constrain projects instead of serving them. Our agency designs tools that fit each project and grow with it, today multiplied by artificial intelligence.
This agency was founded and is directed by Benoît Labourdette, multidisciplinary filmmaker, educator, researcher and consultant in cultural innovation and digital strategies. This position of artist-practitioner makes the singularity of his interventions and of his agency’s approach: projects are always considered through his artist’s eye, and when a group works on creation, digital technology or artificial intelligence, it does not receive a consultant’s discourse, it works in collaboration with someone who practises these tools daily. This artist’s eye is exercised first of all where it is least expected: in the consultancy work itself. Creating the conditions for a strong and transformative artistic experience to take place, giving each person their place and a framework in which they can build with confidence, is an artistic work in its own right, and it is in the preparatory meetings that the quality of what will be lived is already founded. This eye also draws on a serious knowledge of psychic dynamics, rare in the cultural field: the dimension of each participant’s personal journey is taken into account in all projects. This is at the heart of the intersectoral programme carried out in Limousin to develop psychosocial skills through artistic practices, committed for three years, and of the professional days on mental health, young people and images that the agency helped design and facilitate. Design and direction are carried out by Benoît Labourdette; implementation mobilises, depending on the scale of the projects, teams of artists, trainers, developers and technicians.
The agency works with institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre-Lens, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Forum des images, La Fémis, the French Ministry of Culture, the CNC, the Observatoire des politiques culturelles, national theatres, metropolitan areas and local authorities of all sizes, and its expertise is called upon at European level, on the subject of artificial intelligence, education and artistic creation.
The methods we use are documented and shared publicly in the resources of this website, our actions are the subject of detailed accounts, and our approach is developed in the book « Défendre la culture autrement : méthodes pour demain » (2025, free to download).
Supporting cultural policies
Consultancy and support for local authorities, institutions and companies in their institutional projects, their cultural policies and their transformations, in the perspective of cultural rights.
Your institutional project is coming to an end, or no longer matches the reality of your activity. Your local authority is rethinking its cultural policy, its relationship with young people, its territorial dynamics. Or your team is going through a transformation (a merger, a change of leadership, falling funding, a digital shift) that needs to be thought through collectively rather than endured. It is for these situations that the agency designs custom-built support.
This work produces structuring documents: an institutional project, a collaboratively built state of play, a white paper, a shared framework. Their strength comes from the way they are developed. The diagnosis is built with your teams, not in their place; the orientations are formalised and defensible before your governing bodies and your funders, because the people who will have to carry them actually wrote them. What remains often exceeds the documents themselves: cooperation methods that your organisation keeps after we leave.
To achieve this, collective intelligence is practised at every level (governance, teams, audiences), and participatory artistic creation serves as an instrument for getting people talking where conventional meetings fail. Benoît Labourdette designs and leads the process, with the eye of a cultural practitioner rather than that of a consulting firm.
A few recent assignments give the measure of this work.
Collaborative review of film and media education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (ALCA, 2025-2026). Full methodological support for a region-wide consultation for the Agence Livre, Cinéma et Audiovisuel: design of the collective intelligence process, development of the collaborative digital platform, co-facilitation of consultations bringing together some twenty professionals over four months, co-writing and co-editing of an eight-chapter publication, design and co-facilitation of the regional presentation day at the MÉCA in Bordeaux. Read the story
National project for the future of audiovisual media in libraries (French Ministry of Culture, Images en Bibliothèques, CNC, 2024-2026). Membership of the steering committee of this national action-research programme, in which Benoît Labourdette carried the political dimension of the work: leading the “Cultural policy” hearings with elected officials’ associations and national stakeholders, presenting their synthesis at the national conference at the BnF, and facilitating the collective writing workshop that produced the advocacy statement addressed to elected officials. Read the story
Also: the White Paper on cultural decentralisation; the « Éducation aux images 2.1 » action-research programme in Île-de-France; consultancy and training with the Observatoire des Politiques Culturelles; the national conference « Cultures et politiques de la jeunesse ».
Developing film and media education
Workshops, programmes, training, collaborative reviews and territorial policies for film and media education, for regional and national coordinating bodies, cultural venues, local authorities, and educational, social and youth networks.
You coordinate a film education programme, at the scale of a territory or a national network; you run a cinema, a library, a museum, a youth or social-sector organisation; you steer a regional film and audiovisual policy. And you can see that inherited practices are no longer enough: audiences make images every day with their phones, social media and now artificial intelligence have changed what seeing means, and the format of a screening followed by a discussion now reaches only part of the people you are aiming for.
The agency works at every scale of this task: workshops and shared creations with audiences, training for mediators, teachers and youth workers, the design of new formats, collaborative reviews and support for territorial policies, talks and professional gatherings. The common thread is film education through practice: people learn to see by making, with the tools everyone has in their pocket, and analysis grows out of the experience of creation instead of preceding it.
This field is the agency’s historical bedrock, worked on for thirty years and at each of its turning points. Benoît Labourdette was a pioneer of creation with mobile phones (the Pocket Films Festival, founded with the Forum des images in 2005), has written reference books in the field (« Tournez un film avec votre téléphone portable », 2008, and « Éducation à l’image 2.0 », 2015, free to download), has designed teaching resources for France’s national programmes (CLEMI, Lycéens et apprentis au cinéma) and speaks at the national gatherings of the coordinating bodies (École et cinéma, Passeurs d’images), today on the questions artificial intelligence raises for the way we look at images. The methods and tools are shared publicly in the resources of this website.
Among recent work: the collaborative review of film and media education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (ALCA, 2025-2026); « Éducation aux images et citoyenneté », with youth-sector professionals; « Former les regards à l’ère de l’IA », a professional day rethinking film education; the making of a collective film with 80 people at the Passeurs d’images regional gathering; and the « Éducation aux images 2.1 » action-research programme in Île-de-France.
Creating participatory art projects and events
Design and production of participatory art projects and cultural events, for museums, cinemas, cities, festivals and venues of all kinds, including at large scale.
You want a project or an event that genuinely involves its audiences instead of summoning them as spectators: a creation shared with the residents of a city, the visitors of a museum, the audience of a cinema, young people, so-called hard-to-reach groups, people in care settings or far removed from cultural institutions. Perhaps you have already tried to get these audiences to participate, without success: making that participation happen where conventional formats fail is one of the agency’s constitutive skills. Organisations also come to us to renew an existing event whose format has worn thin.
The project is designed, produced and delivered by the agency, and participation is not a communications add-on: it is the very principle of the work. Its artistic standard is what gives it its power. These projects are always conceived and directed by Benoît Labourdette’s artist’s eye, which sets them apart from participatory formats without formal ambition, which audiences see through. The agency has invented formats that have become references in the field (the Pocket Films Festival with the Forum des images, La Fête du court métrage with the CNC, the “Par ma fenêtre” project during lockdown) and works at every scale, from a workshop for ten people to a collective creation for several hundred. Many of these creations bring the generations together, and digital technology serves as a connecting force: each person’s creations are shared in a common online space, which links them together, gives them duration and builds up the project’s heritage.
Conception and artistic direction are carried by Benoît Labourdette; production and facilitation by the agency’s teams, sized to each project. Projects in the social, educational and care fields (mental health, disability, child welfare) rest on lasting institutional partnerships and on the « Pocket Films Empathie » programme, founded with the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron.
Among the projects delivered: the Pocket Films Festival; La Fête du court métrage; « Par ma fenêtre »; « Métamorphoses visio-corporelles » at the Louvre-Lens, a participatory artistic action co-led with young mediators from the École de la Deuxième Chance; « La machine à voyager dans le futur » with Cultures du Cœur, a touring programme of digital creation workshops in the social sector; « Sur la plage de mon imaginaire », a contemplative video installation at Flers hospital; the living museography of Le Silo; « Mémoire du sport dans la Grande Guerre », the participatory creation of a photographic exhibition; « Filme Tout Court » in Villetaneuse.
Creating arts and cultural education projects
Design and production of arts and cultural education projects for schools and youth organisations, with local authorities, cultural institutions and educational teams.
You are carrying an arts and cultural education project and you want it to be more than an outing or a workshop dropped onto the timetable: a project in which young people genuinely create, in which teachers and teams are fully involved, and which leaves traces in the practices of the institution. You may also want to bring in today’s tools, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, creation with phones, without giving in to gimmickry.
The project takes young people’s creation seriously as creation, with the artistic standard that makes the experience matter to them. Educational teams are involved in the design and leave equipped to carry the approach forward, and the process is documented in a way that serves the institution, its partners and its funders. The framework gives young people real autonomy: it is in that autonomy that arts education plays out, far more than in the content transmitted.
We work in co-construction with the educational teams and the project’s cultural partners, in the lineage of active pedagogies: start with practice, trust young people’s capacities, share the creations. Benoît Labourdette has been leading film education and creative projects for thirty years, in and out of school settings, and designs formats that put technology at the service of the experience, never the other way round.
Among the projects delivered: Making virtual reality a ground for autonomy for secondary-school pupils; « Ma Grande Guerre, regard d’enfant » at the Musée de la Grande Guerre in Meaux, as part of the “C’est mon patrimoine” programme; « CinémA.I » at the Studio 13-16 of the Centre Pompidou, creation with artificial intelligence for teenagers; Tumo x AI - Creative journeys into AI; and “Droit à la parole !”, a documentary made with the children of the La Source school about their democratic organisation.
Training professionals
Custom-designed professional training: film and media education, innovative pedagogies, cooperation methods, digital cultures, cultural rights, artificial intelligence.
Your teams or your network need to build skills on a subject where theoretical knowledge is not enough: leading creative workshops, supporting audiences in their digital practices, understanding and passing on cultural rights, integrating artificial intelligence into a profession. What you are looking for is training that transforms practices, not an information day.
Our training works through doing: participants experience the formats before learning to lead them, and it is this lived experience that durably changes their relationship to the subject. They leave with concrete, reproducible tools that they have tried out themselves during the course.
Each course is designed with the commissioning organisation, starting from the participants’ real situations. Benoît Labourdette has been training professionals for thirty years (La Fémis, universities, the CNFPT, professional networks, training bodies in the cultural sector) and regularly co-builds courses with the organisations that host them.
Among the courses designed and led: the course « Les outils, jeux et ateliers d’éducation à l’image » with Images en bibliothèques; the “Développer le pouvoir d’agir” workshops within the training of local cultural-rights group organisers (Paideia approach, Réseau culture 21); the « Culture, jeunesse et numérique » course with the Observatoire des Politiques Culturelles; « Apprendre à voir et à entendre » for the DRAC and DAAC of Pays de la Loire; the course « L’Intelligence Artificielle et la création » for teachers.
Facilitating collective intelligence and cooperation dynamics
Design and facilitation of seminars, committees, professional gatherings, consultations and long-term cooperation dynamics, so that a collective produces what none of its members would have produced alone.
You regularly bring professionals together and you want those sessions to produce something other than minutes. You need to build a common position on a subject that divides people or exceeds each of them: a shift in the profession, a controversy, a shared project. You want to consult a network, a profession, audiences, and you want that consultation to lead to real proposals. Or you want to establish, over time, a cooperation dynamic between actors who barely know each other.
In all these cases, the criterion we set ourselves is the same: what has been produced must go on being useful once the process is over. The work leads to a formalised output (publishable recommendations, a charter of practices, a fully built project, an edited synthesis), and participants leave with methods they can use again.
It is the expected deliverable that shapes the process, not the other way round. We alternate proven facilitation methods (rotating workshops, open space, arpentage or shared close reading, structured controversies, collective writing) with digital tools developed by the agency, today multiplied by artificial intelligence, which put the group to work in real time and between sessions: contribution platforms, shared mind maps, immediate transcription and editing of what is said and written. These methods are documented publicly in Methods for facilitating collective intelligence, where you can consult them before contacting us.
Three recent examples show the variety of scales and forms.
The living museography of Le Silo (Le Mérévillois, Essonne, 2026). Methodological support for the project of the association Le Silo, housed in a 1907 grain silo: rather than freezing the history of the place in a conventional museum, building with residents, artists and the territory’s institutions the form that will share its experience. A cycle of public contribution sessions, backed by a digital platform developed by the agency, where everyone writes during and between sessions. Read the story
An advocacy statement written by twelve people in one afternoon (BnF, 2026). At the national presentation day of the national project for the future of audiovisual media in libraries, facilitation of a collective writing workshop: in two hours, a dozen professionals produced the complete first draft of an advocacy statement addressed to elected officials, put online and shared with them that same evening. Read the story
The ALCA Nouvelle-Aquitaine consultation (2025-2026). Twenty film and media education professionals mobilised over four months, through the interplay of facilitated sessions and a contributory writing platform, leading to a jointly written eight-chapter publication. Read the story
Also: the AI monitoring committee of the Forum des images (2024-2025) and its closing webinar; the « cultural rights » writing and creation seminar, run as an open space; supporting young people and professionals in taking the floor; the giant digital brainstorm.
Integrating artificial intelligence
Supporting cultural, educational and social-sector teams and institutions in the critical and creative appropriation of artificial intelligence: professional uses, governance, creation, critical thinking.
Artificial intelligence has entered your organisation without being invited: some people already use it, others refuse it, and no common position exists. You have to decide what your organisation does with it, says about it and passes on, without giving in to either excitement or panic.
The support works through practice. Your teams handle the tools instead of listening to a lecture, and come out able to make real, reasoned professional use of them. On that basis, an institutional position is built collectively: a framework for use, governance, a discourse towards your audiences. Organisations that wish to can extend this work with creative and mediation programmes using AI, aimed at their audiences.
Benoît Labourdette has been designing and delivering projects with artificial intelligence since its public emergence, in creation, mediation and production, and facilitates monitoring committees on its stakes (creation, ethics, professions, education). This double position, practitioner and researcher, makes it possible to hold together the effectiveness of uses and the building of critical thinking, which are too often treated separately.
This work has unfolded, among other places, in the European expert committee on artificial intelligence, education and artistic creation of the Genshagen Foundation; the AI monitoring committee of the Forum des images; « CinémA.I » at the Studio 13-16 of the Centre Pompidou; Tumo x AI - Creative journeys into AI; « Fabriquer les récits de la culture avec l’intelligence artificielle », a training day for a local authority’s cultural department; and « Intelligence artificielle et création : enjeux et pratiques ».
Creating web platforms, custom tools and films
Strategy, design and production of collaborative web platforms, custom professional tools, digital heritage strategies, commissioned films and documentaries.
You need a digital tool that genuinely serves your project: a platform for exchange between your audiences or your members, a cooperation space for a network, a professional tool fitted to your activity, a digital heritage strategy for your archives and your content. Or you need films (documentaries, institutional presentations, trailers, edited recordings, podcasts) that escape the usual formats.
Tools and films are delivered turnkey, but they are designed upstream with you, as devices in the service of your project and not as mere technical objects. Our platforms and custom tools are built with free and open-source software, hosted with full sovereignty, designed to last, to be taken over by your teams and to evolve with your project: the Pocket Films Festival was able to carry its ambition because its custom tool grew with it for six years, and it is this living conception of tools that the agency has practised ever since. Our films carry the same demand for consistency between what is said and how it is made: “Droit à la parole !”, a documentary on democratic organisation in a progressive school (2026), was made using a method that gives children a democratic place within the film itself.
What sets the agency apart is that it brings together, at its core, strategy, creation and technique: the same eye conceives the device, shapes its uses and carries out its production. Thirty years of audiovisual production and twenty years of web development allow the agency to commit its responsibility from design to delivery, and then in supporting uses.
Among the works delivered: the « Azimut » platform for the MPAA; the collaborative platform of the ALCA Nouvelle-Aquitaine review; the contributory platform of Le Silo; the « Collège des médias » platform for Périfééries; “Droit à la parole !”; the films and podcasts for the Afnic Foundation; the trailers of the Festival International de Films de Femmes.
Giving talks and lectures
Talks and public interventions where the audience contributes: artificial intelligence and creation, cultural policies, youth and digital technology, film and media education, cultural rights.
You are organising a study day, professional meetings, a symposium, an in-house seminar, and you are looking for a talk that genuinely feeds your audience’s thinking, grounded in a practice rather than in a synthesis of other people’s ideas. Often you also expect this event, which brings together fifty, one hundred or two hundred people, to produce something other than a succession of speeches, and each person present to leave with something they have worked out themselves.
This is the very logic of our talks: collective intelligence facilitation techniques are built into the way the talk unfolds. Questions put to the room, answered by standing up or remaining seated, reveal within a few minutes the actual positions of a professional community, including unexpected ones. Timed exchanges in pairs give each person the opportunity to put an idea into words out loud, facing a single other person — a very different experience from taking the microphone in front of the whole assembly. Written contributions (a summary of what has been heard, a disagreement, an additional point) are photographed and shared online by each participant, using a digital tool developed by the agency, very simple to use and hosted on sovereign infrastructure; the wall of contributions built up in this way remains accessible after the day is over, and the final discussion draws on what the whole room has written, no longer only on the questions of those who dare to take the microphone.
This way of working stems from the subjects we deal with. Cultural rights, the place of audiences and of young people, what digital technology and artificial intelligence are doing to professions are democratic subjects; the form of the experience lived during the talk has to be consistent with them. Giving each person present a place and a sense of confidence is part of the point, on a par with the ideas conveyed. A methodological moment at the end of the session spells out the formats that have just been experienced, so that participants can reuse them in their own contexts; these methods are publicly documented in Collective intelligence facilitation methods.
This work sometimes covers the whole day: we then help the organiser design the event. The path from one talk to the next, the place of contributive moments, the welcome (up to and including a book table whose bibliography the participants put together), the edited summary that extends the day for those who were there as well as for those who were not: all of this is designed with you, on the basis of several possible schedules between which we decide together.
Each talk is built for your context and your audience, and prepared with you: your situation, the live questions of your audience, what the day should leave them with. It draws on thirty years of practice and on a body of research published on an ongoing basis (research and innovation, our resources), including the book “Defending culture differently : methods for tomorrow” (2026). Talks are given in French and in English, in France and internationally.
Some recent talks: “Culture differently : postures and methods for tomorrow” for the Cultures du Cœur network; “Audiences : how digital technology reshapes our relationship to the performing arts” for Chaillot Augmenté × TMNlab; “Mental health, young people, images : what are we talking about ?” at professional meetings; “EAC and cultural rights”; and the video talks in the Giving talks and conferences section.
And among the days co-designed from start to finish: the interprofessional day on cultural professionals’ approaches to adolescents, with the Jeune Public au Centre network, at Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux (one hundred and fifty participants); the “Artistic and digital practices for young people” professional day, co-designed and co-facilitated with Act’art (Seine-et-Marne); helping young people and professionals to speak out at the “Cultures and youth policies” national meetings in Villeurbanne, French Capital of Culture; the Meetings on participative creation of the Théâtre de la Poudrerie (Sevran), whose programme is co-developed with the agency and whose online summary of the 2022 edition was produced by it; and the regional day presenting the shared assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, at the MÉCA in Bordeaux.
A research practice
Reflection is part of the work — and it is built with you.
Our missions produce achievements and, along with them, reflection on what has been done. This reflection is documented, published in open access on this site, and developed with the people involved: commissioning organisations, teams, participants.
A large part of our actions follow an action-research approach. We document projects as they unfold, with a precise observation method, ethnomethodology, informed by the cultural rights framework. This work draws from each situation reflective resources that reach beyond the particular case. The aim is concrete: to help professional practices move forward in the cultural field, ours as well as our partners’.
This approach also applies to technical tools. Innovations, most often produced by industrial projects, change our representations and our ways of living; we take hold of them to question them and divert them in artistic, educational and cultural projects, rather than adopting them without distance. This critical perspective, built through practice, is part of what we bring.
Working with the agency means entering this reflective practice. Your project leaves a written, published memory, which serves as a living evaluation and a support for what comes next. The methods developed along the way are formalised and transferable: your teams leave with tools, not only with a memory. And this writing is shared: some of the stories on this site are written by the partners or the participants themselves, because reflecting on what has been done is an activity carried out together, in the same way as the project itself.
This research currently unfolds along a few threads that can be followed across the whole site: artificial intelligence, creation and critical thinking, cultural rights and cultural democracy, film and media education, cultural mediation, including its therapeutic dimensions, and the new tools of the image, from the mobile phone to drones and virtual reality.
This work is shared through seminars, training courses, university teaching and publications. On this site, the stories show the documented actions, the resources gather the methods and analyses drawn from them, and the domains make it possible to follow each subject across the whole.
How we work
How work is organised at the agency: a light company, and a network of people who have been cooperating for years.
Who is behind the many projects recounted on this website? A company with no heavy structure, founded in 2016, and a network of people we work with project by project, in roles that change according to needs. This page describes how it works, with real examples.
Benoît Labourdette production is a company producing artistic works, cultural programmes and project engineering, founded in January 2016 by Benoît Labourdette, in continuity with Quidam production, established in 1999. The structure is deliberately light: for each project, we bring together the team it requires — artists, cultural mediators, technicians, project managers — depending on the nature of the work at hand. This way of working, tried and tested for thirty years, provides great agility: it is what makes it possible to undertake ambitious, multidisciplinary projects, adjusting resources to each context. Benoît Labourdette conceives the projects and is their first point of contact.
A visitor browsing this website may wonder how such a volume of work is possible — we have been asked the question. The answer lies in this organisation: what is recounted here was done by many hands, with different people depending on the project, people who know each other and are used to producing together.
Depending on the project, the roles shift. The photographer and visual artist Myriam Drosne works on projects carried by the agency, and the agency works on hers; the same goes for the filmmaker Romain Baujard, and for the psychiatrist Serge Tisseron and the child psychiatrist Marie-Noëlle Clément in the projects on empathy and psychosocial skills: each gives work to the other, according to the needs of the moment. These comings and goings are akin to companionship: the relationship comes before the roles, and the roles are redistributed with each project.
Commissioning itself takes varied forms. Sometimes the client pays each contributor directly, and Benoît Labourdette holds the place of the project’s architect among the others. Sometimes our partners’ organisations entrust us with missions: the Master’s programme in Exhibition Design and Museography led by Serge Chaumier, to teach video; the Forum des images, with Élise Tessarech, to co-build Tumo x AI and then facilitate its AI watch committee; the French Ministry of Culture, to conduct with Pascale Issartel the hearings of the national initiative on the future of audiovisual media in libraries. Sometimes again, it is the agency that calls on specialists: the developer Anne-Lise Martenot for the contributive functions of the Azimut platform, or the web agency Mosquito, expert in the SPIP CMS, for technical work.
The people named on this page are a few examples among many others. And only the projects carried by the agency can be found here: others are born elsewhere, with our partners, out of the ties woven in shared work.
There is therefore no single direction of commissioning, and this flexibility is a method. It makes it possible to build the right team for each project, and it establishes a relationship of partners between people: everyone has a role, no one is reduced to a status. Whether we employ someone, whether we are ourselves a service provider, or whether we work side by side with no legal tie, the working relationship is the same.
The nature of what we produce mirrors the way we produce it. This conviction, fed by the methods of the liberated company and by John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, guides the organisation of every project.
Two recent examples. For the collaborative overview of film and media education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, carried out for the ALCA agency, the care given to working conditions — those of the team as well as those of the professionals consulted — made it possible to collect an unusual amount of qualitative data in a few months and to produce a result of direct use to the professionals of the region. For “Droit à la parole !” (“The right to speak!”), a documentary on the democratic organisation of the La Source school, we built the shoot on the film’s very subject: identical cameras entrusted to the children, down to the youngest in nursery school, an edit conducted over six months at the pace of a monthly meeting with the school’s team, and a screening with all the people filmed before any distribution. This path took nothing away from the film; everyone took their place in it, and the work is truer to its subject.
The agency acquires and maintains a substantial stock of equipment: computers, cameras, lighting, sound, musical instruments, video projectors, video-mapping systems, stage machinery, mediation equipment. Each piece is tested in the field, kept if it proves itself, replaced if not; over the years, this builds an expertise in equipment that is effective, light and sturdy at once, useful for mediation as well as for audiovisual or artistic production. This expertise is documented internally: technical management is the object of genuine research and development, and precise kits, kept up to date, allow people other than Benoît Labourdette to run the workshops in the best conditions. The travelling screenings, carried out since 2011, are one example: the street-projection equipment is continuously renewed to keep the best possible quality. The animation-film workshops are another: between the animated cinema workshop at the Musée de l’Homme in 2017 and the cut-paper workshops run today within the natural-disaster prevention projects carried with Serge Tisseron, the idea of the workshop has stayed the same, and the technology has completely changed.
The agency has large premises in the heart of Paris, in the 13th arrondissement: offices, a music studio, a shooting studio, a visual-arts studio, and small living quarters for short residencies. Depending on the projects, collaborators and interns work there on site, sometimes for long periods — during the production of the action-research Film and media education 2.1, a whole team was present there for a sustained stretch — and artists, collaborators or interns have stayed there in residence when needed. The equipment is stored there; training sessions, meetings and research time with partners take place there: moments of collective intelligence with no production and no service delivered, devoted to thinking together about our subjects of work. Over ten years, more than thirty evenings of artistic experimentation have been held there: we try things out, we are allowed to get them wrong, and that is how we move forward. Projects have been born there, encounters have happened there; some mediation formats later offered in museums were first tried out during one of these evenings. Work there is free-form and informal, and much comes out of it: it is a place of making, flexible and collective, organised according to needs, in which one can take part. All this rests on the fact that the agency exists as a legal entity, able to own equipment and premises: the artist Benoît Labourdette alone could not do it. The whole is steered by him, within a collective logic: the equipment, the premises and what is learned there are shared, inside the agency and beyond, and research and transmission also happen in the field.
The quality of what the agency produces has its source in an underlying work that resembles applied research, without always having its institutional framework. It is carried out in long-term exchanges: the dialogue with the cultural engineer emmanuel vergès on documentation, cultural rights and artificial intelligence; the popular-education methods passed on by Christelle Blouët and Anne Aubry of Réseau culture 21, which we in turn put into practice and document; the reflective duo held with Jean-François Marguerin throughout the Cerisy symposium directed by Jean-Paul Ollivier; the steering committee of the national initiative on audiovisual media in libraries alongside Pascale Issartel; the cross-readings with Véronique Guiho-Leroux in Nantes. Some cooperations have lasted more than ten years, such as the shared creation with the plant sculptor Jean-Philippe Poirée-Ville and the artist Maëlla Mickaëlle, or the trust built with Sonia Leplat at the MPAA, Valérie Suner at the Théâtre de la Poudrerie, Claudie Le Bissonnais for large-scale workshops, Alice Rougeulle at the Institut pour la photographie, and others. These exchanges are not a sideline of the work: they are what makes it possible, when a project arrives, to go deep, in a constructive and lasting way, because in every project we keep learning from one another.
We document many projects on this website, and this documentation is work in itself. Yet not everything is here: important missions do not have their story yet. For four years, from 2018 to 2022, we accompanied the cultural affairs department of the town of Les Lilas: experimental actions, training for cultural and after-school staff, the introduction of digital tools including a video platform, changes in working methods, the collective refounding of the town’s compass for cultural mediation, and support for the creation of its feminist film festival. For a year, for the town of Fontenay-sous-Bois, we opened up dialogue between the cultural affairs department and the youth department through collective-intelligence approaches. The documentary “Droit à la parole !” does not have its own yet. We will write these stories; in the meantime, what is recounted here is only part of what has been done.
One could read into this model without employees a form of precarisation of work. Our experience says the opposite, on one condition: that ties be maintained over time, with respect, and in both directions. The people mentioned on this page give us work as much as we give work to them; when a project ends, the relationship remains, and it is what gives birth to the next one, on their side as on ours. Knowing how to cooperate between different people is a political skill as much as a professional one. It requires working spaces where everyone, client included, can enrich the project, and where people’s well-being conditions the quality of what gets made. A heavy structure protects as long as it holds; a weave of proven cooperations adapts to circumstances and grows stronger in the shocks.We have devoted an article to this antifragility of cultural projects; our organisation of work is its application to ourselves.
The simplest way is to write to us, describing your starting situation: the organisation or group concerned, the question at hand, the timeframe. The first step is always a conversation, by phone, by video call or in person. Contact: benoit benoitlabourdette.com; in urgent cases, Benoît Labourdette’s mobile: +33 (0)6 80 03 19 83.
Benoît Labourdette production is a French simplified joint-stock company (SASU) with a capital of €46,800. Company registration (SIRET): 818 146 128 00017 R.C.S. PARIS. NAF code 5911C. Registered office: 113 bd. de l’Hôpital, 75013 Paris, France. President: Benoît Labourdette. Contact: benoit benoitlabourdette.com / +33 (0)6 80 03 19 83. Website: www.benoitlabourdette.com