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.
