Actes if is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year! To mark the occasion, we invite you to join us for a time of debate and celebration on December 12 from 5pm to midnight at the Générateur.
Le Bilbo, Les Blues Heures, Le Cadran, Glaz’art, Omnibus, Le Rack’am, Le Radazik. In 1996, these 6 venues dedicated to contemporary music, supported as Cafés-musiques by the DRAC Île-de-France, founded the Actes if network.
20 years later, this network is still in existence, bringing together 31 structures, none of which participated in its creation.
Today’s venues have joined over the years, while others have left, either because they could no longer identify with the shared objectives, or because they have disappeared, swept away by financial difficulties, team exhaustion, the fickleness of public funding…
Without nostalgia, Actes if’s anniversary will be celebrated under the sign of persistence and movement!
The Cafés-musiques were part of a Ministry of Culture scheme set up in 1991, notably after a few scuffles in the “underprivileged” and emblematic neighborhoods of Vaulx-en-Velin and Mantes-la-Jolie. By 1995, the government was providing financial support for 65 music cafés, explicitly for their artistic and social role, and for their operations! Against this backdrop, the 6 venues in the Ile-de-France region that came together to form the Actes if network set out to pool their resources and experience, and to promote their common objectives: to support young (“emerging”, as we would say 15 years later) creation, and to open up their venues to local residents, which was still expressed as “broadening and educating audiences”.
Actes if’s 20th anniversary: art as a possibility for invention and relationship!
At the turn of the 2000s, the “Lextrait report” demonstrated the diversity and vitality of cultural venues springing up on the initiative of civil society, the fertility of wastelands where artists were awakening ghosts and opening doors to neighbors. Actes If, an already solid network, took part, as such and through its members, in the definition and promotion of “intermediary venues”. But as early as 2002, the short-lived New Territories of Art policy was abandoned, while in 2003 the system of intermittent workers in the performing arts was seriously called into question, and the “banlieue” revolt of 2005, far more significant than the events of 1991, was not officially recognized as having any cultural dimension.
20 years of Actes if to defend culture as a possibility for the common and the political!
In 2005, Actes if had 18 members covering the entire spectrum of the artistic field in the Paris region: “new” venues seeking a mixed economic and political model where subsidies would support invention rather than prescribe action, where profits would reinforce independence. The notions of “solidarity economy” and “third sector” soon came to the fore, as did membership of UFISC and a move to the Maison des Réseaux… Actes if develops internal pooling and cooperation, and takes positions on regional and national public policy issues.
With Actes if’s 20th anniversary, we’ll be celebrating, along with all those who know the need for it, the possibility of art and culture emancipated from the laws of the market and the tutelage of administrations!
In 2010, the members of the network decided to get involved in the definition of the Fabriques de Culture promised by the regional majority. Two years of discussions, public debates, confrontations and co-construction led to the implementation of a regional support scheme for the operation of the fabriques, largely inspired by the Actes if proposals. The same cycle saw the organization of the Forum National des Lieux Intermédiaires et Indépendants in 2014, which led to the creation of the Coordination Nationale des Lieux Intermédiaires et Indépendants, bringing together more than 10 networks and unions in the arts sector. And as of 2016, the Ministry of Culture’s budget includes a line item for intermediary venues for the first time.
We’ll therefore be celebrating 20 years of Actes if with the memory of the roads we’ve travelled, and the energy of the pioneers, but we won’t be letting our guard down because…
While the Ile-de-France region’s Fabriques de Culture scheme contained some disappointing provisions, it did establish a principle: to fund the operation of intermediary venues that have proven their legitimacy in the most diverse territories… And yet it already seems to be called into question today in favor of a policy focused on the most institutional heirs of the French cultural system.
The French Ministry of Culture’s Ateliers de Fabrique Artistique scheme announced support for intermediate venues, which are confronting the country’s social disintegration and trying to listen to its youth… But already the allocation of funding seems to be based much more on the old, reassuring criteria of disciplines and academic recognition, than on the dynamism and inventiveness of up-and-coming teams.
And everywhere, venues in the Actes if network and elsewhere are closing, while more and more pharaonic and expensive projects are springing up, “cities” far removed from the cities and everyday uses of art and culture.
So, on December 12, 2016, we’ll be celebrating 20 years of a battle that’s at least a century old, and still to be fought!
We’ll empty together the half-full glasses of half-victories, and fill together the half-empty glasses of half-defeats, and take joy and courage for the battles to come…
We shall toast, undisciplined, rescued and determined, to persistence and movement: to life!