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, 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.
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 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 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 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 premises as a laboratory
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 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 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.
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 in the shocks.We have devoted an article to this antifragility of cultural projects; our organisation of work is its application to ourselves.