Working together

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 defended the political dimension of the work: leading the “Cultural policy” hearings with elected officials’ associations and national bodies, 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 « 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 ».

Cultural rights entered French law in 2015, and many local authorities and organisations have since written them into their projects, without always knowing what this changes in their ways of working. Your teams have heard of them as a theoretical notion, sometimes as one more injunction, and you are looking to turn them into a working tool. It is for these situations that the agency designs awareness sessions, training courses, seminars and long-term support for organisations.

The way of working stems from a conviction that Benoît Labourdette develops in the article Transmitting cultural rights : a question of coherence: cultural rights cannot be transmitted as content, they are lived in situations, and they cannot be passed on with facilitation methods that run against them. Working sessions therefore go through practice: shared creation, analysis by participants of their own projects, collective intelligence methods. The common reference is the Fribourg Declaration (2007), from which Benoît Labourdette has drawn an analysis tool with which a team rereads its projects in the light of the eight cultural rights.

The agency works in close connection with Réseau culture 21, which leads the Paideia approach in France: Benoît Labourdette facilitates the “Développer le pouvoir d’agir” workshops in the training of local group organisers, and several of the agency’s support projects, in Nantes and at the MPAA, took place within this framework. He also takes part in the work on revising the Fribourg Declaration (“Sens culturel(s) des droits humains” workshops, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, 2025), in particular on the links between cultural rights and the digital world. And beyond these dedicated interventions, he brings cultural rights in as a working tool in all his training courses on culture, youth and the digital world and on mediation, because they are a key to respecting the dignity of the other and creating connection, and thus to fulfilling the missions of the public cultural service. The agency’s own way in is shared creation: having people experience cultural rights in lived situations, rather than lecturing about them.

A few recent interventions give the measure of this work :

• Raising awareness of cultural rights for Nantes métropole (2022). A day co-facilitated with the Nantes local group formed through the Paideia approach, for nearly eighty professionals from the cultural, social and sports fields, with artistic creation at the heart of the method: participants made animated films and podcasts about the eight rights, gathered on a dedicated mini-site. Read the account
• “Cultural rights, appropriation and implementation” training at the Institut pour la photographie (Lille, 2024). Two days of support for professional practices, co-built with the team: case studies analysed through the eight rights, project design and evaluation methods, and a booklet of tools drawn from the participants’ contributions.
• Support for the cultural rights approach of the MPAA (Paris, 2022). Support for the Maison des Pratiques Artistiques Amateurs, carried out within the Paideia framework; the work is gathered on a mini-site.
• Also: the course “Cultural rights: concrete tools for mediation and evaluation” for the Bibliothèque départementale de l’Essonne (2024); the « cultural rights » creative writing seminar of the Master Arts du Spectacle, université de Caen Normandie; four years of support for the cultural affairs department of the city of Les Lilas; support for Actart (Seine-et-Marne) and for the mediation department of France Musique on cultural rights and young people; a day when cultural professionals question their approaches to adolescents; and the section Cultural rights, which gathers Benoît Labourdette’s essays on the subject.

The question reaches you in different forms. Young people don’t come to you, and you don’t know whether the problem lies with them or with you. Your local cultural strategy mentions students without knowing where to start. Your teams waver between discouragement and alarmist talk about screens. Your culture department and your youth department work side by side without knowing each other. Your youth workers, your mediators or an artistic team are asking for methods to create with teenagers. These requests carry the same need: understanding young people better in order to work better with them.

We respond with the format that fits your situation: a morning or a full professional day bringing all your professions together around this question, a training course, an action-learning programme where participants build their own projects along the way, long-term support, a talk, a webinar. These moments benefit from being cross-sector: bringing culture, youth work, education, social work and care around the same table is often where things start to move, because each profession discovers what the others know.

The content starts from what 15-25 year olds actually do, as documented by sociology and by our own fieldwork, not from the received ideas that circulate about them. Youth only exists in the plural. Young people’s cultural practices have never been so intense; they have changed places and forms, and digital practices deserve to be looked at closely before being judged. This sociological ground meets psychology, which shows what a secure framework makes possible in a group, pedagogy, where people learn from lived experiences far more than from information, and cultural rights, which remind us that respecting a person’s culture is the condition for their contribution. Many young people, when asked about their tastes, answer “I like it, but it’s rubbish”: that is exactly where the work begins.

As in all our work, professionals experience the methods they will later be able to lead: questions answered by standing up or staying seated, timed exchanges in pairs, written contributions shared online through our sovereign digital tools. The methods experienced are named and explained at the end of the session, because they can be reused as they are, with young people, with an audience, with a team. And what has been produced remains: a collective bibliography, a wall of contributions, an editorialised summary, all accessible after the day, for those who were there and those who were not.

Benoît Labourdette has been working with young people for thirty years, in creative workshops, in job-integration services, in day hospitals, in child protection settings, and trains the professionals who work alongside them. This practice crosses artistic creation, pedagogy, psychology, cultural rights and digital culture, and it is this crossing that makes it possible to give professionals references and methods they can use the very next day, and through them, a real place to young people.
Among the projects carried out: the back-to-school morning on the cultural practices of 15-25 year olds, facilitated for the 220 staff members of Laval’s culture department [id to be confirmed?lang=en]; the action-learning programme that connected the culture and youth departments of Fontenay-sous-Bois; seven years of support for the cultural action department of Les Lilas, where teams learned by going through the experience; the cross-professional day on cultural professionals’ postures towards teenagers, at Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux; the national « Culture, youth and digital » training course of the Observatoire des politiques culturelles and its laboratory for new project formats; the training of Lot-et-Garonne cinema operators in welcoming young audiences.

To go further: the resources section Culture, youth and digital, the Youth domain, and the neighbouring pages Working in the field of care and child protection, Developing film and media education and Training professionals.

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.

Four 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 through which its experience will be shared. A cycle of public contribution sessions, backed by a digital platform developed by the agency, where everyone writes during the gatherings and between them. 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). Some 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.

Artificial intelligence is already present in your organisation, though no one decided it would be: some use it, others refuse it, and no common position exists. You have to decide what your organisation does with it and what it passes on, without giving in to 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 addressed to 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 of 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.

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 strength. These projects are always conceived and directed by Benoît Labourdette, with his 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 an instrument of connection: each person’s creations are shared in a common online space, which 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.

You are leading 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 tradition of active pedagogy: 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 student autonomy; « 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 » in Studio 13-16 at the Centre Pompidou, creation with artificial intelligence for teenagers; Tumo x IA - Creative journeys to the heart of AI; and « Droit à la parole ! », a documentary made with the children of the La Source school about their democratic organisation.

You coordinate a film education programme, across 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 trying to reach.

The agency works at every level of this work: 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 (« Shoot a movie with your mobile phone », 2008, and « Image education 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 assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (ALCA, 2025-2026); « Image Education and Citizenship », with youth-sector professionals; « Training Eyes in the Age of AI », a day to rethink image education; the making of a collective film with 80 people at the Passeurs d’images regional gathering; and the « Image Education 2.1 » action-research programme in Île-de-France.

You are preparing a professional day or a round table on adolescents and screens; a team of psychologists, educators or foster carers is asking to be trained in mediation through images; your institution is working out its position on mobile phones; you want to bring together the families of your area around digital parenting; a regional health agency, a DRAC or a territorial directorate is engaging you in a project to develop psychosocial skills. These situations call for two kinds of expertise: hands-on practice of creative workshops with young people, and knowledge of the institutional frameworks of care, social work and justice.

Our work proceeds by doing: professionals themselves experience the formats they will later lead, and this lived experience transforms their relationship to the subject more surely than a lecture. Mediation through creation is offered as a complement to the work of speech, never as a substitute for it, and a non-judgemental stance towards people’s digital practices comes first.

Benoît Labourdette has been working for more than fifteen years with the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, is trained in psychoanalysis and teaches on the university diploma course in Arts and Therapeutic Mediation. Among the actions carried out: the conference « The use of screens at the heart of child protection » with Serge Tisseron; the « psychosocial skills » seminar for the Limousin youth judicial protection service and the inter-professional seminar bringing together the PJJ, the DRAC, the ARS, education and justice; the « Mental Health and Cinema » professional days with ACRIF; a video workshop with autistic children in a day hospital; the Pocketfilms-Empathy project.

The stories of these actions are gathered in the section Working with care and child protection services, and the methods underlying them in Screens, adolescence and psychic life.

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.

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 looks back at 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 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 (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.

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, for your teams to make their own, 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: a single person 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 itself from design to delivery, and then to 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.

We support cultural organisations in building their own working tools: a shared database of qualified contacts, a tracking system for projects and partner organisations, a management tool for an event or a festival. The tool is designed with the team from its real data, developed in free and open-source software with the help of artificial intelligences, hosted on your premises, and the team is trained to make it evolve on its own. The criterion that has guided this work for twenty years: what has been built must go on serving once the support has ended.

Your situation

Your organisation runs on tools that do render service, but that have piled up without an overall plan: multiplying spreadsheets, files travelling by email, standard software of which you use only a part and which imposes its own logic on you, sometimes a service provider to whom the specifics of your work must be explained again at every change, and who charges for every change. The data exists, but it is scattered between people and departments; when someone leaves the organisation, they take with them what they alone knew. Nobody on the team can tell with precision, figures and documents in hand, everything that successive teams have accomplished in the place over the years, with whom, for whom.

A professional habit makes this situation worse: in the cultural sector, working tools are held to be a matter for technicians, a subordinate question to be delegated. Our observation, tested in the field, is the opposite one: working on one’s tools is part of the work itself. Benoît Labourdette founded and directed the Pocket Films Festival; the festival was able to carry its ambition because its professional tool, built for it, grew with it for six years. A tool conceived from within the work broadens what teams can undertake.

What you obtain

• A tool exactly fitted to your activity and its vocabulary, built from your real data and your real uses, observed with you.
• A database shared by the whole team, accessible from computers and phones, including remotely and securely, with a history of actions and a fine-grained qualification of contacts, in compliance with the GDPR.
• Sovereign and frugal hosting: your data stays with you, on a simple file server (NAS) or a small server, with no platform subscription and no dependence on a software vendor.
• Data structured in open, documented formats, which will remain readable and reusable in ten years, in twenty years, whatever the software of that time. It is also thanks to this structuring that the team will one day be able to tell the story of the place.
• A trained team, able to make the tool evolve on its own as use unfolds, without anyone becoming a computer specialist.
• Working time made available again for the missions that matter.

How we work

We begin by mapping the data with the team, in prepared meetings where everyone has the floor: what information circulates, between whom, in what forms, with what gaps and what duplicates. This mapping is already a piece of collective intelligence work on the profession itself; this is how, in Les Lilas, with the cultural affairs department, we drew the map of the data before building anything, and discovered along the way a considerable amount of working time lost for want of shared data.

Then comes progressive development, in free and open-source software, carried out with the help of artificial intelligences. This is the decisive change of recent years: the agile method, which consists in building in small steps and testing each step in use, can now be put into practice by the teams themselves, with the AI taking on the writing of the code. Where one previously had to rely on a software vendor, and remain dependent on it, one now builds a fully free tool, which one understands and owns. We train the team in situation, on its own data: what a server is, where the software lives, how to ask the AI for a change and how to check it. The team’s autonomy is the explicit goal of the support.

We have been practising this approach for twenty years, making it evolve with the available techniques. The professional tools we supported fifteen years ago at Cinémas 93 or at Périphérie are still in service today [récits à venir : art2098 et art2097 en préparation]; the databases built with the ACID team supported the association’s internal operations and the durability of its contents; in 2020, we supported the production company Drôle de Trame in setting up its shared file server. More recently, Benoît Labourdette supported the visual artist Virginie Houdet in taking back control of her own website with the help of artificial intelligences, until she could make it evolve on her own. Artificial intelligences radically lower the threshold of access to this long-standing principle: what used to require a developer now requires a method, a framework, and someone to accompany the first steps.

We test this approach on ourselves: the agency tracks its contacts, its projects and its partner organisations with a tool built in this way, hosted on a simple NAS and accessible remotely and securely.

References

• Experimenting together to become autonomous : seven years with the cultural affairs department of Les Lilas: mapping the data, building two professional tools with the teams, appropriation training, autonomy.
• www.lacid.org website + Databases: operational databases (films, selections, contacts, newsletter) built with the team over a year and a half.
• www.festivalpocketfilms.fr website: taking back the festival’s website in-house, when the quotes requested from providers turned out to be too high.

Resources to go further:

• RAG, or how to give an AI the power of a business tool
• To Code or Not to Code ?
• The last straw

For twenty-five years, the agency has been building web platforms and digital tools designed as instruments of cooperation. We are opening a new line of work that extends this history: developing digital tools in the service of cultural democracy, and designing them with the organisations that will use them. Here we present where this work comes from, what is in service today, and how to take part.

Digital technology is never neutral

A digital tool carries a conception of the relationships between people. Who can write, who can read, what is kept, what disappears, who owns the data: each of these technical choices shapes the democratic life of the group using the tool. Benoît Labourdette develops this analysis in Cultural Rights and Digital Technology, which proposes putting the eight rights of the Fribourg Declaration into digital practice, and extends it in his writings on digital sovereignty (Digital sovereignty, a democratic emergency; Sovereign Digital, a Micropolitical Choice).

Most of the contribution tools used in the cultural sector today (collaborative walls, forms, online polls) are commercial services. Contributions are hosted outside Europe, difficult to export, and organisations lose access to them when the subscription ends: entire participatory processes vanish without leaving a trace. We make the opposite choices: free and open-source software, sovereign hosting, fully exportable data, and content that remains accessible years after the process has ended.

Tools in service

A few examples of tools of this kind, each one for a real need, that we design, develop and run:

• the « Azimut » platform for amateur artistic practices, launched in February 2025 with the MPAA and in active development: amateur artists make themselves visible there, meet one another and share resources, by themselves and across autonomous practices, a direct enactment of cultural democracy;
• « By my window » (2020), a participatory video creation platform opened during the lockdown, whose films remain online;
• the video platform “La fabrique numérique” in Les Lilas (Seine-Saint-Denis), which gathers the videos made by residents in the creative workshops offered by the town (read the story of this long-term collaboration);
• the « Media College » platform (2022) for Périfééries 2028, Saint-Denis’s bid for the title of European Capital of Culture, which collects contributions from the territory’s stakeholders (read the analysis of this experience);
• the giant digital brainstorming (2022), an idea-gathering format for large groups;
• the digital workshops run with Cultures du Cœur (listen to the podcast), where each participant has a permanent page gathering their creations;
• the contributory writing platform of the collaborative assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (ALCA, 2025-2026), which supports four months of collective work leading to a joint publication in eight chapters;
• the contribution platform of the living museography of the Silo (Le Mérévillois, Essonne), where residents, artists and institutions write during and between the public sessions, to invent the form that will make it possible to share the experience of the place (read the story : « Enlarging the Silo »).

This work is tied to a sustained practice of cultural rights: the « Cultural rights » creative writing seminar, photographic creation workshops within Réseau culture 21’s Paideia process, taking part in the seminar « What pedagogy by and for cultural rights ? ». The article Analyze your project using the Fribourg Declaration presents a method we use in training and consultancy.

Cultural democracy, augmented by digital technology

In these systems, we are experimenting with a practical enactment of cultural democracy, augmented by digital technology. Many organisations that want participation to thrive, in the cultural field and beyond, operate top-down, and their members’ ideas struggle to find a place there (The political dimension of organisational frameworks). We do the opposite: everyone contributes when they can, in disorder and spontaneity, and artificial intelligence produces syntheses of these contributions at a speed that changes the nature of the exercise. There is no longer any need to format people’s words in advance in order to process them; this freedom gives openness and legitimacy to the most diverse contributions, which are the richest. This is the shift that cultural rights describe: moving from cultural democratisation, which disseminates one culture to as many people as possible, to cultural democracy, where each person is recognised as a bearer and creator of culture (Democratisation or cultural democracy : what these two words do to theatre).

This experience holds true beyond the cultural sector. We want to put it at the service of experimental participatory democracy processes: consultations that lead to real productions, programmes of action shaped by the people who will carry them out, horizontal dynamics established over time.

A new line of work

We want to give the cultural sector contribution tools that belong to it. Concretely: permanent contribution walls, with managed access and full exports; platforms for editorialised collective writing; memory spaces for participatory processes; consultation systems across a territory. AI-assisted development, which we practise daily (To Code or Not to Code ?), allows us to build these tools within timeframes and at costs within the reach of cultural organisations, networks and local authorities.

Two projects are under way so far, the sovereign contribution wall and the Fribourg Declaration analysis tool; others will follow. We describe each of them in a dedicated page, written in the present tense and updated as the work progresses: you will find them just after this article.

Building these tools together

We want to design these tools with the people who will use them. We organise collective intelligence meetings by videoconference, open to networks, local authorities, cultural venues and social organisations, to identify needs, examine existing tools and outline together the ones that are missing. What is produced there is published and shared with the participants, in keeping with the criterion that guides all our collective intelligence work: what has been produced must continue to serve.

If you would like to take part in these meetings, or if your organisation needs a tool of this kind, write to us.

Our missions produce concrete outcomes 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.

The approach

Much of our work follows 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 seize on them to question them and repurpose them in artistic, educational and cultural projects, rather than adopting them uncritically. This critical perspective, built through practice, is part of what we bring.

What this changes for you

Working with the agency means entering this reflective practice. Your project leaves a written, published record, 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.

Current threads

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 image-making tools, from the mobile phone to drones and virtual reality.

Where to read it

This work is shared through seminars, training courses, university teaching and publications. On this site, the stories show the documented actions, our resources gather the methods and analyses drawn from them, and the domains make it possible to follow each subject across the whole site.

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.

A light company

Benoît Labourdette production is a company producing artistic works and cultural programmes, and providing 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.

Work flows in every direction

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 psychoanalyst 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 only a few 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.

From the lightest to the most extensive

Partnerships come in all sizes. A prepared methodological videoconference, supported by documents, to help a team build its event or project. Support over a few meetings, remotely or on site. A lecture, a training course, a workshop. The design of a digital tool. A complete project, conceived and carried out over time. The cost follows the same logic: it is not the talking that costs money, but the preparation, the technical work and the logistics, and we always itemise our estimates line by line so that everyone can see what they are paying for and make informed choices. Working well is not necessarily expensive, and modest budgets, such as those in the social sector or child protection, deserve the same quality of design as any others.

The process makes the result

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.

Equipment and technical management

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 focus 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 premises as a laboratory

The agency has large premises in the heart of Paris, in the 13^th 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, and one can take part in it. 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 underlying work

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 formed 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.

Not everything is recounted

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.

Knowing how to cooperate

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 with the shocks. We have devoted an article to this antifragility of cultural projects; our organisation of work is its application to ourselves.

The first conversation

The first conversation, by phone or videoconference, is free of charge, including when it brings together several people from your organisation. During this time, we are already working: understanding the situation, sketching out possible approaches, and providing methodological and budgetary guidelines. It does not commit you to anything, and sometimes it is all that is needed.