It is a particularly ambitious programme. Designed to stimulate original initiatives and projects, “New Worlds”, a device wanted by the President of the Republic to get out of the health crisis, quickly became for the actors of the creation scene a space of possibilities as innovative as exciting. That we judge: designed as part of the stimulus package, this program, which mobilizes 30 million euros and solicits sites and buildings from the National Monuments Centre and the National Coastal Conservatory, gives carte blanche to the selected teams and highlights the originality of the projects. With a single motto: stay at listening to creation ».
One year after the launch of the programme, each of the 264 projects is progressing at its own pace, some have already met their audience, others are on the verge of completion, all of which will have to be completed by summer 2023. Among the major trends, there is a return to collective practice, which is praised by many creative teams, and the importance of major societal issues, such as the place of the individual, the question of identity or that of ecology. We asked Bernard Blistène, chair of the selection committee, former director of the National Museum of Modern Art, at the Centre Pompidou, and a great connoisseur of the contemporary creative scene, to come back for us on the issues of New Worlds.
What was the roadmap of New Worlds?
This initiative was born from a simple idea: it was urgent to hear what the scene of creation had to tell us about today’s world. That is why we have set up a new facility, with 30 million euros to be committed quickly, that can pay particular attention to an essential phenomenon: the pluridisciplinarity of the contemporary scene. This approach immediately found an important echo, since after the publication of the call for proposals, we received 3,200 applications. The selection committee – a team of eight people who are experts in their fields and have to learn from each other – unanimously selected 264 projects. Of these, 80 come from collectives, half of which – notably – were formed for the occasion. The artists wanted to be together. Finally, it is impossible to separate the creation of the relationship to history and the diversity of spaces and places of reflection. Hence the proposal that artists settle in places under the aegis of the Centre des monuments nationaux and the Conservatoire national du littoral.
The method chosen is also new…
Yes. We came up with a method that was simpler than public procurement. The artists propose the projects they want to develop and once we have analyzed their feasibility, we give them the means to carry them out. We are producers and not owners. Unlike public procurement, creators remain owners of their projects. This gives a different latitude. The unifying feature of these projects is to experiment with forms that a framework too constrained prevents from realizing. I love the idea of being the first to be surprised by what we’re trying to initiate.
The artists wanted to work together and find a concrete country. They’re sort of out of lockdown twice because of New Worlds—
That’s right. In a way, there was a kind of utopia, the idea that in this situation, artists, who have the desire to open up to the world, found themselves even more than other professions unable to transmit, and that we would be out of this situation more quickly if they were there to testify to it once they had carried out their project. We have done everything we can to streamline procedures. We have worked urgently. New worlds questions artists about their desire.
What are the main points of the 264 projects selected?
I regularly say that artists are not whistleblowers. By this I mean that creation is an intelligence of the present but also something that tends towards a passing of the real time. Among the projects, the great subjects of society are present, whether they are those related to the future of the individual, to his mutations, to the role of science, to the reality of the world we inhabit. Starting with ecology, in the philosophical sense defined by the philosopher Isabelle Stengers who speaks, following thinkers like Felix Guattari or Donna Haraway, of a ecology of practice ». It assumes that most artists are sensitive to a kind of interdependence between different intellectual, artistic and living forms. If I were to describe things in a simpler and more immediate way, the issues of identity, the issues of nature and the artificial space in which we live, and the desire that people have to think and work together – a form of cosmopolitanism, also – permeate the diversity of projects we’ve had.
Where are we at? Are projects presented throughout 2022?
If all the money is paid out by the end of 2022, artists have until the summer of 2023 to carry out their projects. Many of them have already been inaugurated, such as the projects of Joël Andrianomearisoa at Villers-Cotterêts Castle, Laurent Pernot at the Glanum Archaeological Centre, Félicia Atkinson at Regnéville Castle-sur-Mer, from Gaëlle Choisne to the National Museum of the History of Immigration, from Khaled Alwaera to the Subsistances in Lyon, or from the writer Christian Garcin around the American poet E. E. Cummings at the Abbey of Montmajour (see our interview).
In the coming weeks, we will be launching a considerable number. I will go to the IRCAM where a collective of artists reinterprets the Polytope of Xenakis for the 50th anniversary of the work that the musician created in Cluny, Chambéry where Mohamed El Khatib and Valérie Mrejen invented an artistic mediation project, at the MUCEM in Marseille for a project around a European rescue ship of Sébastien Thiéry, at the Désert de Retz in Chambourcy for a project of Stéphanie Coudert who imagines a performance course around clothing… we’re not going to stop running from one place to another in the next few months.
Is an extension of New Worlds envisaged?
Of course, it is not for me to decide. We started with two questions: what do artists dream about? What does the situation in which they find themselves make more than ever impossible to achieve? The time has come to learn from this experience. The enthusiasm, however, is certain.
New worlds, this is...
- €30 million to support creators
- 430 selected designers
- 264 projects throughout France
- 85 groups aged 20 to 96
- 60% under 40
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