The current context of confinement continues to accentuate the gaps between the public of culture and those who are distant from it, in particular by widening the digital divide and increasing the isolation of certain populations. For the first time, the whole team, as well as the collaborators and artists, have mobilised to make an online session.
Although mediation is a discipline of contact and transmission, during two weeks of collaboration, the participating artists committed themselves to push the limits of the field in an attempt to explore many questions such as: how to continue to make participatory living art through the digital medium? How can we continue to transmit emotions to an audience with little access to culture, and even less so in the context of confinement?
Being aware of the limits of the digital medium, of the limited activities it allows, and of the limited access of audiences to adequate material and an internet connection, these 16 young artists proposed 4 main digital mediation projects, based on the advice of Mark Withers. They carried them out as a group in order to provide the audiences of Passerelles (educational and socio-artistic services of the Festival d’Aix) with creative tools (video, texts, recordings…) that would allow them to create themselves in autonomy.
One of the projects is being posted on the Festival d’Aix website: conceived by Sarah Théry, Anwar Saidi and by Etienne Fauré, Aix Radio is an outreach project that takes the radio as a mediation tool through the conception of a radio show with the participation of about a hundred college students, residents, patients, volunteers and caregivers who lent themselves to the game.
The Outreach Skills sessions is a training programme to raise public awareness of the arts. It gives young artists the opportunity to put their musical talents into practice and to develop their professional skills outside of the concert hall, and thus reach out directly to audiences. Its aim is to help each participating artist to design and implement his or her own artistic awareness project. Each session gathers singers, musicians and creators from a variety of countries, and provides a space to reflect on the contributions artists can make to society and to specific communities.
With the help of Passerelles, the Festival d’Aix educational and socio-artistic departments.
Coproduced by the Mediterranean Youth Orchestra.
Supported by the Fondation Orange and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation
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