Emergence(s)
Culture & Education Symposium 2014
Festival d’Aix-en-Provence
The main theme of this sixth Culture & Education Symposium, organised by the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in partnership with RESEO (the European network for opera and dance education), the French Ministry of Education and the Association Française des Orchestres, is Emergence(s), a subject chosen because it suggests the exploration of creative projects in new and unexpected forms.
The Symposium’s invitation highlighted the various artistic and cultural offerings from independent artists, collective groups and other small structures that experiment in close connection with specific territories and their social context. These projects take the time to allow the emergence of content, of form and of meaning, in a process characterised by continuous adaptation. Their apparent ephemeral quality is both voluntary and assumed. These characteristics distinguish them at first glance from the more typical projects of established cultural structures, which are often subject to the framework and logic of the institution itself.
The theme therefore was the examination of these emergent creative initiatives and processes: how do these projects imprint themselves onto the territories in which they take root, how do they connect with the populations they seek to address? How do they reorient (or not) the political, economic or social context?
Why and how are these atypical initiatives, whose very nature is voluntarily uncertain, integrated into the institutional strategies, and at what price?