Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear friends,
Welcome to the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
I am very pleased to see all of you here today, to finally put faces to a beautiful idea that has been on our minds for nearly six months now.
You are the first promotion of Creation in progress. I congratulate you on being selected, as I believe there were more than 600 of you responding to this call for projects!
You have all chosen to devote yourselves to artistic professions, where research and creation are thought of on a daily basis in a permanent but necessary questioning. This freedom to create is dear to us, we think it is at the heart of our model of society.
The diversity of the cultural sectors that you represent is, in my opinion, promising. Tomorrow, you will transform our vision of the world, of life into society, of the city, of our environment. We count on you!
For some of you, choosing this path was probably a risky gamble and perhaps your parents were not very reassured to see you embrace such a career.
However, our 100 higher education and culture schools, which award more than 40 national diplomas, have an integration rate of more than 80% for their 10,000 graduates every year, in all sectors combined. So this is another misconception to fight!
Congratulations for your perseverance, your work, and also for your audacity. It is this audacity that must always guide your choices and your projects! And it is probably again this same audacity that led you to participate in this national operation!
Creation in progress is an operation that we carry with the minister of national education of higher education and research, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who sent you a video message that will be shown in a few minutes.
His goal, as you know him well now, is to intensify the presence of artists in the school, to give the children of the most remote territories of culture the chance to participate, with you, in a beautiful and great collective adventure.
We wanted to respect certain balances, first of all between women and men, but also a balance between the departments that are almost all taken into account in the distribution of residences, including the overseas departments.
Finally, we wanted to have a diversity of artistic disciplines represented. Unusual projects at the school were selected, carried by architects, textile designers, digital artists, stop-motion animators, circassians, etc.
The culture is not absent from the schools. It is very present. Since 2015, an art education trail has been set up to make young people aware of art and culture, starting at school. Hundreds of projects are carried out each year by artists, cultural professionals, teachers, or young people engaged in civic service missions.
In five years the government will have doubled the resources in favour of arts and cultural education to enable one out of two young people in school to have direct contact with arts and culture.
What is new with Création en cours is that this project is based primarily on young artists.
It is therefore up to you to build a project tailor-made with a school, a class, on the basis of the proposal you wrote us last November and which seduced the jury.
Olivier Meneux, Director General of Medici workshops and coordinator of this project will tell you more about it, but I want to stress an important dimension of this residence: that of dialogue.
Before you even begin the concrete work of speaking, you will exchange with the teachers, the teaching teams, and all those who make up the educational community.
Your intervention will undoubtedly upset the established order in the class. Because often the arts workshops reveal unsuspected skills and interests of teachers and students themselves.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, a department which for ten years has been running an active policy of school residencies, teachers readily recognize that this type of long-term encounter between an artist and students, In addition to bringing novelty to the classroom, it can sometimes upset the hierarchy among the students, some of whom, who were previously bored or had difficulties, may “reveal themselves” to an artist, rediscover their taste for school, discover an artistic vocation itself.
You will have to work on your project so that it opens a space for dialogue with the young people you will embark on the process of creation, by articulating it also with the work of the teachers, so that they can draw from it material for their teachings.
Your project must find its place in the school, but it must at all costs keep its originality, I want to emphasize that.
The residency that you will be living in the next few weeks will take place in a school that is probably unusual for arts education projects. It will probably take some time to find a common language.
Thanks to this experience, and this is all I wish for, some of the children you will meet may want to join later in higher education courses culture, others will become enlightened amateurs, but all will have understood that art, culture is within their reach.
Go even further: encourage them to push the doors of theatres, cinemas, museums, libraries, Play this beautiful role of smuggler!
We also bet that each of you, faced with this experience, will progress in his practices and see his profession in a new light. I am still sure that, on a more personal level, these are beautiful moments that you are preparing to live with children and adolescents, moments of sharing that will also change you.
I also wanted to tell you that this operation, so that it takes place in the best conditions and bears all its fruits, is well supported.
The schools will be supported by the academic directorates and the inspectors general. You will be by Medici workshops Of course but also, in the vicinity, by the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs located in the region where the school is located, to whom we have asked to meet you in the coming days (some of the directors are present this morning). You can count on their listening and support.
I would also like to hear from you this morning, which is why I wanted two of you to say a few words:
Gwenaël PROST, from the Ecole Européenne Supérieure d'Art de Bretagne (EESAB) in Rennes, in residence «plastic arts» in Haute-Vienne; Amandine RIOU, from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture (ENSA) in Lyon, in residence «architecture» in Ain; Thank you.
I also asked two heads of art schools two directors of higher education to tell us how this operation was received. We will therefore hear from Claire LASNE-DARCUEIL, director of the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique (CNSAD) in Paris, and Sylvie CORREARD, head of competitions and higher education at FEMIS.
Finally, I would like to quote Eloge de la transmission, this beautiful book where Georges Steiner talks with a teacher from the suburbs, and I want to extract this beautiful sentence: To act of poetry is to leave theory for experience ».
The adventure promises to be exhilarating.
Beautiful «creations in progress»!