One year before the Games, the Cultural Olympiad in the Competition

In 2024, the Olympic and Paralympic Games will not only be sporting. In parallel to the competition, which will take place from July 26 to September 8, another Olympiad, cultural this time, is underway. This event, designed by Paris 2024, was built in close collaboration with stakeholders in culture and sport, including the ministry of culture. " The Cultural Olympiad is the occasion for a unique encounter between sport and culture to go on unexplored terrain, explains Noël Corbin, Delegate General for Transmission, Territories and Cultural Democracy at the Ministry of Culture. This is a challenge for the Ministry of Culture, which has decided to invest nine million euros, not to mention all the money released by our public institutions and decentralized services. »

This event will take place in all disciplines and throughout the territory. In total, nearly 1,600 projects have already been identified, half of which have already been certified or are in the process of being certified as “Cultural Olympiad”, a distinction created especially by Paris 2024 and directly linked to the official programme of the International Olympic Committee. Among them, 150 are supported or accompanied by nearly fifty national operators and by the Ministry’s decentralized services, the regional cultural affairs directorates. « We really want people in every territory to feel concerned about this path to the Olympics. This programming responds to an ambition of cultural policy built on four axes: participation, inclusion with in particular people with disabilities, porosity between sport and culture and the relationship to the body ", continued Noël Corbin.

A major collection of sports archives

The ambition of participation and association of all French people in all the territories is translated very concretely with the Great Collection of sports archives. Photos, posters, newspaper articles… all these documents can be included in this collection launched with the Interdepartmental Service of the Archives of France and which is addressed to all: federations, clubs, athletes, amateurs, supporters. Everyone will be invited to submit documents related to the world of sport. These documents will then be classified and valued in different forms: exhibitions, workshops or arts and cultural education actions.

The porosity between sport and culture is materialized by the project of Archi-Folies with twenty national schools of architecture on one side, twenty national sports federations on the other. Architecture students have been designing ephemeral pavilions for several months that will be installed in spring 2024 on the site of the parc de La Villette and will host during the competition the French sports federations that will propose initiations open to all. The models of these pavilions have been exhibited from 7 to 20 July at the ENSA Paris-Malaquais.

Finally, from September 20 to April 7, the Museum of Decorative Arts will present theexposure «Fashion and sport, from one podium to another» which deals with the strong and constant links between fashion and sport. The course will show many women’s and men’s clothing, as well as paintings, sculptures, ceramics, posters, photographs, drawings and prints… Videos - films, INA archives, parades, advertisements - will reveal the body in motion, a permanent concern in fashion exhibitions.

A program that is rolled out in the regions

At the crossroads of sports performance and art, dance has a special place in this cultural Olympiad. In Martinique, the Kivuko company and its director, choreographer Christina Towle, will bring together professional dancers and a hundred young people aged 12 to 17 around the project Rebounds! Choreographic match » combining dance and basketball in the public space, from 1^er on August 10. On September 9, the 14th^e edition of the Biennale de la danse de Lyon, Europe’s largest choreographic parade, will focus on the dialogue between art and sport with costumes and floats prepared with athletes and clubs. The CCN of Rillieux-la-Pape will reinterpret the famous New Zealand rugbymen haka in a more festive tone with locals.

In mid-September, L'Art du Collectif, a collaborative project combining several Val-d'Oise labelled and conventioned scenes, will change its scale and expand throughout the department with «Envol», its new creation in which façades, walls and windows become the unlimited playground of eighteen acrobats - circus artists, freestylersformer world champion athletes. In New Aquitaine, the culture of the oval ball is also the subject of an artistic creation with Drop, the 1^er September, with the Pôle national du cirque de Boulazac (Dordogne) and the Compagnie Crazy'R. Again, this is a high-flying show designed for twelve acrobats, which will echo the world of rugby.

This rich cultural and sports program will extend to all territories as well as Reunion Island, which will highlight combat sports and martial arts through a photographic exhibition by Osman Badat, on the heritage sites of the department from September. In Moselle, the castle of Malbrouck offers from 13 September an exhibition dedicated to the vision of sport through comics. The festival of Photaumnal Beauvais in the Hauts-de-France region will address the theme of sport from September 16 to December 31 with about forty exhibitions and in particular six with the magazine L'Equipe and the agency Presse sport, recounting the great moments of sport history in the magazine, or a collective with a hundred photographers.

From the stage to the stadium, there will be only one step with, in Burgundy-Franche-Comté, the project «Le beau geste» which will bring together a group of young volunteer athletes and a theatre troupe to create a show mixing amateurs and professionals, which will end in March 2024.