Address by Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication, on the occasion of the 2009 Agora Award for Design

This is why the Ministry of Culture (and Communication) has
gives essential importance, through teaching, support
the creation and dissemination, and the enhancement of its heritage.
This is why, on October 1st, I inaugurated the Cité du Design in
Saint-Etienne, which will be a forum – I almost said an agora…
innovation and research.
That’s why I want to fully record the design and its memory
in the vast movement of the digital revolution, which I have identified
as one of the top priorities of my department. And that’s
why we have put in place a portal to access many
digital collections, which will now be accessible to the public,
accessible to everyone. You know, a recent study shows that
the digital divide is closing in our country and I
I am delighted because it is an opportunity for the transmission of culture.
That’s why – last but not least – I wanted to be present today
for the presentation of this young creation award, which is part of a
incentive policy and has been supported for two years by the
exemplary patronage of HERMÈS, whom I thank for this testimony of
trust and enlightened generosity.
This young creation is particularly brilliant this year and, well
of course, I am here to congratulate the winner of this
“vintage” of the AGORA Stock Exchange, Mr. Gilles BELLEY, and
of the nominees whose projects I have also considered carefully
remarkable. They show the new face of design: a design that
has constantly evolved in relation to the company, very often – and
the evidence the case here – ahead of deployments he “designates”
before making them real.

I was very struck by the fact that these young researchers, according to a paradox,
stimulating, based the idea of sustainable design on the idea of perishable.
They have a very good intuition that “durable” is not what is static.
but what is constantly changing, evolving and adapting. I almost
want to quote the oriental wisdom of BUDDHA and its suggestive formula
well known: "There is nothing constant except change." At
within this grammar of everyday life that I mentioned, our designers
invent or reinvent a kind of home ecology. I was very
in this regard, the recipient’s original proposals. You speak
of «plain», «hill», «twig», etc., as many elements
that you know how to poetically integrate at home in
your “Fabrique”, whose very term made me think of a distant
cousin of the «Retz Desert» that I inaugurated a few months ago, a
kind of almost utopian microcosm, including perhaps the elements
a miniature “Japanese garden”. It seems to me that the winner, as well as
all nominees, paid particular attention to the requirement of
flexibility and the question of continuity: continuity between man and
its environment, between nature and artifice, between the outside and
the interior…
All explore and decline the modalities of a daily gesture and
adaptation of the human environment to the urban environment.
This notion of adaptation seemed to me, quite rightly, at the heart of your
research: the notion of “third-object” fully participates in it since it
shows the refusal of frontal opposition between man and his
environment and integrates design into this
continuity and therefore harmony which is one of the elements of its definition.
But all this shows us that contemporary design whatever
the extreme finesse and, so to speak, the grain size of its alphabet, is
fully connected to a movement that inscribes man in a
global environment and therefore in new dimensions.
For we have, I believe, arrived at a moment in our history and
our culture where we go back to thinking big, from
global way, because we live in a world itself
in which the major issues – the environment,
land use planning… – can receive only one
overall response. The Grand Pari(s) project testifies to this. You know,
I set up tomorrow, alongside the President of the Republic, the workshop
architects at the Palais de Tokyo. And I am convinced that the
design must fully benefit from this boiling, perhaps from this
emulation with the expanding geometry of these large projects that do not
touch not only the capital and draw what I call a
humanism with an urban face.
I already fully participate in the project and the name of AGORA
this major issue, which refers to a crossroads of
fields of nature and culture, art and culture,
industries. By giving essential importance to the development
research and technological innovation, AGORA opens the
perspectives, cross the fields of investigation and inscribe the design in a
grand design.

In short, this contemporary design of which you are actors
particularly promising, helps to found several types of
values: not just “use” and “exchange” values, not
aesthetic values, but also the ethical values that
the quality of our living together.