The Ministry of Culture has a national ambition for cultural programming associated with the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris. The programming of the Ministry’s national events and public institutions has been redesigned for the Cultural Olympiad in order to encourage projects that explore in an unprecedented and original way the exchanges and links between culture and sport.

Very popular with the general public, national events led by the Ministry of Culture take on an Olympic tone in 2023 and/or 2024: the Music Festival, the Cultural Summer, the European Archaeology Days (organized by INRAP), Les Nuits de la lecture and Partir en Livre (organised by the CNL), European Heritage Days, French Language Week and the Art History Festival (organised by the INHA and the Château de Fontainebleau).

Archi-Folies 2024: an architectural creation and innovation project for architecture schools in the Parc de La Villette

The 20 national higher schools of architecture (ENSAP) are invited to create twenty ephemeral pavilions in La Villette. For several months, the students have been designing these demonstrator prototypes of an ecological architecture, sober and reusable, in resonance with the follies of the architect Bernard Tschumi who punctuate the 55 hectares of one of the largest European urban parks. The models of the pavilions will be exhibited at the beginning of the summer at the ENSA Paris-Malaquais, and the 20 Archi-Folies will be mounted on the site of La Villette in spring 2024. During the Paris 2024 Games, they will host the French National Olympic and Sports Committee and the French sports federations, which will propose initiations open to all.

The Great Collection of Sports Archives

On the occasion of the Paris 2024 Games, the Archives de France launch a call to collect documents related to the world of sport from federations, clubs, athletes, amateurs, supporters...

Once classified, their valorization in the network of national and territorial archives will take several forms: exhibitions (temporary, itinerant, virtual), study days, workshops and pedagogical files, artistic and cultural education actions, multimedia products...  In this context, the Departmental Archives of Lot-et-Garonne have already launched a collection around the theme of cycling.

The educational case: "sport in art"

Articulated around multiple activities, the Histoires d'Art à l'École teaching kits, aimed at school and extracurricular audiences, develop innovative forms of learning to raise children’s awareness of art.

The result of a partnership between the Rmn - Grand Palais and the National Museum of Sport, the «Sport in Art» case will allow you to discover the rich history of the Olympic and Paralympic Games: social issues, sport and health, representation of sports in art...

CNC: cinema, audiovisual and technical industries at Olympic time

The CNC is constructing an event-oriented programme to match the Games and is currently under construction in the fields of cinema, audiovisual and technical industries. It will revolve around the values of Olympism in a process of promoting the diversity of creation and uses; a common thread given to the most important festivals, the restoration of heritage films, the organization of cine-concerts - The Novel of Carpentier (1913) and The Great Passion (1928) will be broadcast at film concerts in several regions - the creation of a cultural kit for cinemas or the integration of art and sport issues in artistic and cultural education.

To be noted soon : The Great Passion and Carpentier’s Novel will be screened respectively on 25 and 26 January 2024 at Lux, National Scene of Valencia. 

The Philharmonie de Paris, a link between sport and music

For these artistic highlights in the colors of the Olympics, the Philharmonie de Paris offers a rich program, which will associate leading artists such as Philippe Parreno, Douglas Gordon, Rachel Marks or Thierry Escaich with French athletes hailed worldwide: Lilian Thuram, godfather of the children’s orchestras Demos (Musical and orchestral education device with social vocation), or Kylian M'Bappé, «godfather» of the Symfolia project. Between October 2022 and April 2024, this project will bring together 10,000 young people from Île-de-France around plastic creation workshops led by Rachel Marks, as well as creation and musical discovery workshops.

Fashion and Sport exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts

From September 20, 2023 to April 7, 2024, the exhibition will present the strong and constant links that exist between fashion and sport, through a course presenting many feminine and masculine clothes, but also paintings, sculptures, ceramics, posters, photographs, etc., reflecting the ongoing exchanges between these two fields. Several videos - films, INA archives, parades, advertisements - will show the body in motion, a permanent concern in fashion exhibitions, and intrinsically linked to the sports theme.

The Pentathlon of the Arts

The Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles offers the public a «Pentathlon des Arts», conceived as an artistic training and inspired by the «Pentathlon des Muses», imagined by Pierre de Coubertin for the 1912 Olympic Games. On Friday, June 23, 2023, on the occasion of Olympic and Paralympic Day, the public is invited to participate in an event around the five arts of the Pentathlon. Introductory workshops on visual arts and architecture, discovery of digital arts, word and spirit games, dance, singing and theater are on the program of this exceptional day.

Tell me ten words on the podium

The Ministry of Culture is dedicating the next edition of Tell me Ten words ” to sport and the values of Olympism. From September 2023 to June 2024, a participatory awareness operation will invite everyone to play and express themselves, in a literary or artistic form, around ten words: adrenaline, prowess, escape, false start, collective, offside, champion, go to oranges, mind, tie.

Performance, photographic control

On an initiative of the Ministry of Culture, the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), in partnership with the Centre Photographique Marseille and the Musée régional d'art contemporain Occitanie in Sérignan, launches a call for applications for a national photographic commission entitled PERFORMANCE. 

Open to a variety of photographic practices, this call for applications is addressed to photographers working in the broad field of the image and invites them to grasp the theme of sport echoing our world, its contemporary issues and its relationship with the new representations of the performative body.