Paris, 30 January 2014,
Madam President of Universciences, dear Claudie Haigneré,
Dear Philippe Guillet, President of the Association des musées et centres pour le développement de la culture scientifique, technique et industrielle (MACSTU),
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,
It is a pleasure for me to be here with you today, after Geneviève Fioraso and Louis Gallois yesterday, to show just how committed the government is in all its components, including by mobilizing its innovative financing tools, for scientific, technical and industrial culture. I am well aware that the very formula of scientific, technical and industrial culture, or the somewhat barbaric acronym of STIC, can be debated. But allow me to dwell on the first of these terms, culture. Because it is a cultural issue that brings us together today, an issue that gives full meaning to the words of Cédric Villani, one of the great French scientists of today who is also a writer: «the poet and the mathematician do the same work». One delivers a verse, the other a formula: in both cases «they recreate the world». If we are all gathered here today, it is for what unites the poet and the mathematician: to give meaning, for our citizens, to the world around them.
Moving the world forward, our artists and scientists are steadfastly committed to it. But in the society of the XXIth a century based on the knowledge economy but also sometimes on the return of irrationalities, on the creative expansion of initiatives in the digital sphere, on the development of collaborative innovations, the sharing of scientific knowledge, technical and industrial should no longer be used solely for to bring out the artists and scientists of tomorrow. It must make it possible to share these advances, but also the doubts and the questions specific to their approach to the whole population. Because in science as in art there remain unexplored continents and adventures to engage. It is in this emancipatory dimension that the cultural stake of the CSTI is based.
I would like to thank the organizers of this National Forum of Technical and Industrial Scientific Culture and especially Universciences, which, while fulfilling its mission of spreading the field of scientific and technical culture, is, for me, a key player in our cultural policies in general, especially for its actions at the service of access to culture for all. By promoting the policy of public institutions in favour of so-called cultural distant audiences, and I have already had the opportunity to salute this action during the 10th anniversary of the Living Together mission, and in favour of people with disabilities, Universciences participates fully in our cultural policy.
Scientific, technical and industrial culture, in addition to its humanistic dimension, is a real democratic challenge, that of allowing the citizen to participate in an informed way in the debates of our time without reducing itself to an instrumental role that would consist, through education to make public policies more acceptable Scientific and technical culture also has an economic stake, as Louis Gallois pointed out, for whom it is a lever for the recovery of our country. Finally, it is an important element for the development of our territories and a powerful vector of social cohesion because it affects audiences that are sometimes distant from cultural and educational structures.
That’s why I signed up, alongside Geneviève Fioraso to carry out this ambition of enhancing and generalizing scientific culture.
To want to oppose scientific culture and «the other culture», is an outdated vision; it goes back to a time when we were not talking about culture but about Fine Arts. This distinction really amounts to not recognizing what culture is today. Indeed, science, technology and industry feed the entire cultural sector.
Science is present in thetraining of cultural actors, I am thinking of the graphic designers, restaurateurs, designers and architects who, as part of their training, are exploring the fields of chemistry biology, materials science, but also robotics and nanotechnology.
The researchfounds the excellence of thefundamental missions of our heritage institutions Whether it be in the field of archaeology, the restoration of works or the specific treatment of materials used in contemporary art, the successful partnerships with many research laboratories illustrate this.
Technical innovation, that of architects or crafts Today, the excellence of French know-how that we are envied abroad is one of the strengths of our economic competitiveness.
And it is necessary to insist finally on Industry linkages with culture when the study I conducted with Pierre Moscovici at the beginning of the year shows that the culture sector accounts for 3.2% of GDP, especially because of the key sectors such as cultural industries : cinema, music, audiovisual production and the animated image, but also digital and video games, a sector of innovation that you discovered yesterday, I believe, through the exhibition devoted to it.
All of you, federations of popular education, centres of CSTI, who have the essential role of being smugglers, mediators so that citizens appropriate science in their daily lives, have also the vocation to convey culture in all the dimensions I have just mentioned. For culture can be, for many of our fellow citizens, an entry point into science.
Indeed, if science plays a major role in the service of culture, the reciprocal is true: artists and cultural policy have a major role to play in the transmission of science.
Artists are people of creativity, of innovation; they are “permeable”, if I may use the term with the greatest inventiveness. That is why I am delighted with initiatives such as the one on our national stage in Grenoble, France, which has been awarded the title of our national live entertainment policy but which is developing a project for a centre for art and science creation through a fruitful partnership with the CEA. This center allows the needs of our artists to meet the technological advances necessary for their artistic project: who knows today that the innovation of the game console «WII», great commercial success, was initiated by the needs of dancers, to reproduce their movements on stage?
I am delighted with the mission entrusted to the Director of the Casemate de Grenoble by Geneviève Fioraso, to ensure that the CCSTI are living places, bringing innovation, creativity and multiplying partnerships with cultural institutions. Digital is the formidable gateway. This is obvious in the field of live entertainment, but I also think of the network, so close to people, of public reading. One of the challenges of the network of media libraries is to become, everywhere in the territory and even if great experiences already exist, the local digital cultural public service, the place of orientation in the knowledge offered by the digital. Including, of course, scientific and technical knowledge.
With the adoption of the Higher Education Act, the Government has chosen to renew the partnership between the State and local authorities on scientific and technical culture. The Regions will henceforth be the coordinators of the initiatives of the territories in this sector, which will be an opportunity to strengthen these links, closer to the realities of each territory, with the public reading, decentralized cultural policy since the 1980s.
To engage my ministry in the service of scientific, technical and industrial culture is to answer the important question of its presence in the media. The broadcast of the CSTI is included in the specifications of the public service missions of France Télévision; and the new impetus given in March to France 4 as a channel. Dedicated to children will be able to support France 5, the knowledge chain, in this area.
Above all, cultural policy and scientific and technical culture finally have the same priority: that of youth. It is to young people that we must redouble our efforts, mobilizing renewed pedagogical and cultural approaches.
That the research operators can ensure, as the Minister of Higher Education has indicated to you, that each laboratory’s intervention with at least one school or youth establishment in its territory fully participates in the action that we are conducting, collectively, with Vincent Peillon through the reform of school rhythms and with Valérie Fourneyron with whom I signed this week a partnership agreement in favour of the young generations.
This is why I naturally link the scientific and technical culture in the great project that I made the priority of my ministry for the mandate: arts and cultural education.
The actors mobilized for scientific culture and arts and cultural education are often the same and come from the same philosophy: through mediation, transmission, they want to allow our youngest citizens to express their creativity, to represent themselves and to understand the world in order to act on it.
It is a matter of associating them more closely, because I am convinced that by drawing on the network of actors and skills mobilized around the major arts and cultural education project, scientific culture can reach a wider audience. In the same way, I have no doubt that the actors of arts education throughout the territory will benefit from collective projects like the ESTEEM project that you, the actors of scientific and technical culture, With the help of the funds of the Office of the General Commissioner for Investment, you have succeeded in creating a common portal that lists all the initiatives and highlights the good practices of those involved in scientific, industrial and technical culture.
I have no doubt that these two national ambitions feed each other to reach as many children as possible. Because after all, the stakes are the same, mathematician or poet, it is a matter of recreating the world.
Thank you.