Context

REACT (Resources for European Accessible Cultural Tours) is an Erasmus + project which aims to improve the experience of cultural visits for all visitors, in particular those with special needs and/or adults, families and children who are distant from culture for various reasons (allophone public, disadvantaged environment, etc.).

The aim of this project is therefore to equip and train professionals in order to broaden the range of digital cultural mediation services by promoting the inclusion of cultural institutions, both on site and online, in order to meet the changes and challenges facing the museum sector.

As part of this project, the various partners will be meeting with different players in the cultural sector to hear their stories and their points of view.

Speakers

Clémentine Brochet – Communications Officer at Les Apprimeurs

Alexia Jacques-Casanova – Founder of Artizest

Transcription

(Clémentine Brochet): First of all, can you introduce yourself?

(Alexia Jacques-Casanova): My name is Alexia Jacques-Casanova, and I’m a consultant and facilitator of participative approaches in museums and, more broadly, in cultural institutions. I also advise on what we call the visitor experience within a museum.

(C.B) Can you tell us about your background?

(A.J) I had the chance to study in Anglo-Saxon countries, so I was able to gain professional experience directly related to the cultural sector very early on. I’ve done a lot of work for NGOs, associations and diplomatic representations on issues and projects that combine questions of politics and social justice with questions of art and culture in general.

(C.B) What exactly is Artizest?

(A.J) Artizest is the structure I created to support cultural institutions and museums in this participative approach on two levels. Firstly, internally, because we realise that these institutions often work completely in silos, which means that the lack of conversation is quite… let’s say deleterious, particularly for the public.

So I work with them internally, to get them talking, but also directly with the public. So my job is to imagine and create participation protocols so that the museum teams can work, co-create or at least consult with the public to whom the various media and exhibitions are dedicated.

(C.B) What types of organisations do you generally work with?

(A.J) They can be big museums, national museums. I’ve also worked with a few eco-museums, libraries, and local authorities, so the cultural departments of local authorities on certain themes. And then there are really what we call cultural institutes, whether in France or in other countries, abroad.

(C.B) Do you have any examples of projects you’ve carried out that you could tell us about? I saw, for example, that you recently worked with the Musée du Val de Marne?

(A.J) So the MACVAL (editor’s note: Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne) is in the process of rewriting its scientific and cultural project. This is a strategic document that is now almost compulsory for cultural institutions. In this case, Nicolas Surlapierre, who is the director of the MACVAL museum, wanted to include as many members of staff as possible.

And my job was to prepare and run various collective intelligence workshops, so that all the staff could express themselves and take part in drafting this scientific and cultural project.

(A.J) But on the question of involving the public, I have a project that is perhaps more telling. It’s a project I’m running with the Strasbourg Zoological Museum. The idea is that, when it reopens, the Musée zoologique de Strasbourg wants to integrate a participatory body, a citizens’ body that would allow the public, the people of Strasbourg, to have their say within the museum, at least for the time being, in terms of cultural programming. So my work with the Musée zoologique de Strasbourg is to design and run workshops with the public, to help them define what this participatory body would look like.

So instead of saying ‘we’re going to create a committee of visitors or we’re going to have an annual vote’, we’re actually defining the very basis, the very perimeter of this participatory body with the residents at the moment. And then we’re going to do some prototypes and tests in the autumn based on what we’ve heard from the first workshops.

(C.B) And what methods do you use in your work?

(A.J) To do my work at Artizest, I use various methods that I learnt about during my studies and my professional career. So there’s quite a lot of design thinking, because that’s a method I was lucky enough to be trained in when I was a student. There’s also quite a lot that comes from popular education, which is also a field in which I evolved quite a lot at the start of my career. And then there are ideas from right and left to manage collective intelligence… and of course questions of accessibility.

(A.J) But in fact, for me, the idea is always to come up with a way of solving the challenge I’ve been given. So, for example, finding a way for local people to get involved in a museum or finding a way to develop critical thinking through a participative and interactive mediation system. So I’ve got a challenge, and I’ve got an audience that needs to be persuaded to meet that challenge. And my job is to design tools and participation protocols that will help build that bridge.

(C.B) How is a workshop run? Is there one method that is used every time or does it depend on the audience?

(A.J) So participatory workshops are really tailor-made because they always depend on the audience and at the same time on the institution, its history, its positioning and its objectives.

So in fact, it’s always made-to-measure. I have a cultural institution that comes to me with a challenge, an objective, so, for example, to involve… we’ll say involve teenagers, because that’s an audience that cultural institutions often seek out.

So, based on this challenge, I’m going to devise activities, I’m going to find the right relays in civil society that will also enable me to reach the target audience. And based on the time I have available, because there are workshops that last 1/2 day, I have missions that can last 6 months.

So, once again, I’m going to design the best possible sequence of activities, using various channels of expression. So I try, in the participative tools that I design, to really take into account all the diversity of intelligences and channels of expression so that everyone can find what they are looking for and have a visual or written or oral support, individual or collective, so that everyone can find the right entry point.

(C.B) And how do you identify these audiences?

(A.J) Often, we either have a challenge in mind, for example a theme that we’d like to develop critical thinking or we’d like to develop knowledge, the ability to act on… I don’t know, for example, the environmental cause. So I’ve got a theme and then we’re going to work with the museum to find the public most likely to be involved in this theme.

Or conversely, the museum or cultural institution arrives with a particular audience in mind. So, for example, the teenagers I mentioned earlier. And here, the work is going to be to think almost in the opposite direction, about all the themes, all the points of entry that might be relevant to this audience. So we have two different entry points, either a theme or an audience. And then we can start working from there.

(C.B) Is there a desire to bring more remote audiences closer together in the projects you run?

(A.J) There are indeed audiences who are distant from traditional cultural institutions, but that doesn’t mean that they are distant from culture. I think it’s interesting to bear in mind that audiences who don’t come to museums or who don’t go to traditional, established cultural institutions are not audiences who don’t have cultural practices. So this is a field job that takes time, because it requires a relationship of trust to be established. These are audiences who are often exploited for their own ends. So the best way for me, once again, to get closer to these audiences and not just to bring them in, I insist, is really to do it on their terms, on their ground, and in fact to think about how the museum can act differently, how the museum can maintain relationships that are multiple and not always the same relationship of ‘We open the doors – one-sided channel – to people who enter the museum and that’s it’.

(C.B) Is accessibility an integral part of your projects?

(A.J) Accessibility is a central issue for the museum. And here again, I think it requires a huge amount of exploration and understanding of the different users, their needs, their practices and how they get round certain difficulties. If we think, for example, of motor accessibility issues within a museum, the best way of tackling these issues is to involve the main people concerned. Right from the design stage. So right from the start, before we even come up with an idea for an accessible device or an accessible visitor route, I think there’s already a huge amount of research, observation, exploration and survey work to be done, which unfortunately is often not done properly, due to a lack of means, a lack of time of course, obviously this is not the fault of professionals in the sector, but rather due to a lack of resources. So these are phases of work that are necessary but which unfortunately are often put to one side.

(C.B) And what role does digital technology play in the projects you work on?

(A.J) I think that quite a few things have been created, particularly during the Covid pandemic, which have shown that digital technology can make certain establishments or certain cultural opportunities more accessible to audiences who are unable to visit the site or for whom the fact of being in a shared space with other people can be a source of great anxiety or even totally unthinkable. So there are certainly things to be explored here. Even though, once again, digital technology is not my field, I find that what we call ‘figital’ proposals, which are a mixture of the physical and the digital, are often quite interesting from the point of view of accessibility and of offering digital experiences that do not cut us off from the reality of the collections and, therefore, digital devices that, instead of cutting visitors off and putting them almost in a bubble, removed from what they may have in front of them in a museum, will, on the contrary create a bridge with the objects on display at the time.

(C.B) In your opinion, what are the main steps in moving towards the most inclusive mediation possible?

(A.J) In fact, it seems like common sense to say that, in order to design a mediation or a device for a certain audience, what could be better than to do it with that audience and to question and co-create with that audience, to test with that audience, to involve them at every stage?

So it’s both common sense and something that’s very difficult to put in place, because we have ways of working that, from the outset, don’t go in that direction. But if we are to move towards greater accessibility, my answer will always be to involve people and get them to participate. And also to prepare well. By this I mean being aware of our visitors’ objectives, their needs and the obstacles they may encounter. Because in cultural institutions, in museums of course, we are open to everyone. But by trying to do everything for everyone, we often end up with devices, mediations and messages that are totally diluted. And even if it may seem a little contradictory, it’s really important to segment these audiences and to do so by needs and objectives rather than by age group or socio-professional category.

When we talk about universal design, we realise that a person in a wheelchair, for example, may have the same needs at some point as a parent with a pushchair, whereas at the outset we might not have put these two people in the same category. So I think it’s important to think about the segmentation of these audiences, and obviously to involve them from the beginning to the end of the design process.

This interview will soon be available on video on the REACT project website.