Can we still bury the cultural hatchet? The management of the Ateliers Médicis in Clichy (Seine-St-Denis) wishes to believe that yes: room for de-escalation, debate, dialogue, out of pity… Since 2020, the Ile-de-France region, a community chaired by Valérie Pécresse, expressed its disapproval of seeing the cultural establishment of Clichy-Monfermeil support the artistic project of Mehdi Meklat, whose anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist and misogynistic tweets sparked controversy in 2017. Following the board meeting held on Tuesday, and while the Ateliers Médicis intend to renew their support for the “Chichas of thought” festival co-created by the young journalist, the region finally announced on Wednesday the suspension for 2023 of its subsidy in favor of this place which has become in a few years the flagship and the experimental laboratory of cultural policies in the suburbs. In a press release, the region explained that it regretted that the management of the establishment “stubbornly supports a person who has made such unacceptable remarks […] These programming choices go completely against the values of the Republic.
Fall and repentance
In 2017, “the teen prodigy of the Bondy Blog” as it was called Freed, and darling of France Inter, had to withdraw from his journalistic activities after the resurgence of thousands of anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist and misogynistic messages, published under a pseudonym between 2010 and 2017. Mehdi Meklat then apologized for tweets “despicable, infamous” compulsively written by his Mister Hyde when he was younger. A renewed mea culpa in a book, Autopsy (Grasset, 2018) in which he pleaded for a right to be forgotten and the possibility of a second chance. His story of decline and repentance inspired the film by Laurent Cantet Arthur Rambo, released in 2021. Today, legally, these hateful tweets could not be prosecuted, since they are prescribed. Thus, the Ateliers Médicis undoubtedly felt free to welcome, in 2020, the new Dr. Jekyll in creative residency with his faithful collaborator Badroudine Saïd Abdallah.
There, “Mehdi and Badrou” developed a podcast called “Les Chichas de la Pensée”, in which they invited an artist under the age of 30 each month by co-hosting the show with young people from Clichy and Montfermeil. Still online on the Ateliers website, this podcast was the prefiguration of a festival which today bears the same name and which brings together many artists and thinkers from cultural diversity. The first edition, in 2021 at the Magasins Généraux in Pantin, included internationally renowned personalities such as Arthur Jafa, Mati Diop, Raoul Peck or Maboula Soumahoro, an academic accustomed to media platforms and author of a book on her identity as a black French woman and Muslim. A family that LR might classify under the label “identity communitarian”?
Others are free, however, to host the festival, and many cultural institutions in the region did so: the General Stores in Pantin, therefore, La Villette, the Nanterre-Amandiers Theater which hosted a few weeks ago a – free premiere of Alice Diop’s film Saint Omer in the presence of the director, the Pompidou Center in early 2022 with, among others, the Goncourt Mohamed Mbougar Sarr prize. In September, the Festival d’Automne à Paris opened its new edition with the Chichas de la Pensée, for a dozen or so rushed appointments, recalls the artistic director Francesca Corona, “a young and diverse audience, attentive to the intersections between living arts, literature, cinema and philosophy”. Among the scheduled artists: Mati Diop again, Kayije Kagame, one of the actresses of Saint-Omer. 3,000 people in forty-eight hours. “It is the most innovative thought laboratory, which reaches a diversified public who does not frequent institutions”, launches the director Mohamed El Khatib.
“Freedom of programming”
Supporting “a generation from the peripheries, including new voices in cultural policies”the management of the Ateliers Médicis simply considers “to do our job, in a manner consistent with our missions, we are told. We are mandated for this. This is our programming freedom.” Persisting in the face of blackmail from the region could cost them dearly, however.
Of the 6 million euros budget of the Ateliers Médicis, 150,000 come annually from the community run by Valérie Pécresse – the rest being mainly provided by the State. In addition, regional aid is currently necessary to finalize the construction of the final building planned to house the suburban Villa Medici and ensure its national and international influence. Of the 36 million euros for the site, 5 were insured under the State-region plan contract. At the Ateliers Médicis, we regret that their calls to discuss the Shishas of thought file, launched three years ago, they say, have never been followed up. “But we maintain hope for a discussion.”