Paris (AFP)

The president of the Palais de Tokyo, Emma Lavigne, talks about her desire to push cultural democratization further, which she had already made her priority at the head of the Center-Pompidou-Metz.

Q: How are you going to pilot this great museum, supposed to be a place of permanent creativity?

A: The Palais de Tokyo, the largest center for contemporary art in Europe, must be a sounding board for the world and its challenges. We are not in cultural consumption but in cultural awareness. We don't necessarily look for blockbuster exhibitions, even if we want more people.

We do not have collections to manage, to exhibit. This flexible space can accept all kinds of metamorphoses. Few institutions have the capacity to help artists produce. Almost 50% of the works on display are produced by the palace.

Next to the major thematic exhibitions on the state of the world - for June 2021 we are working on the "Reclaiming the Earth" project involving artists, notably aboriginals -, I am sensitive to the famous white cards where we offer the palace, its space , its DNA, its flexibility, so that an artist comes to deliver his universe. We want to be 100% attentive to his raw vision, which we cannot orient. We are going to welcome the German visual artist Anne Imhof and her very underground universe.

The Palais de Tokyo must be able to be a tool to express its obsessions and visions. It is the space of the impossible.

It is very important that institutions are sounding boards, polyphonies, looks. We are like an archipelago of thoughts, of meaning. They are also forms of counterpower.

Because today the judgment goes at a crazy speed. And go ahead and kill you on social networks! You have to give people critical tools so that they can make their own judgment. I am very wary of these spontaneous autodafés.

Q: What is most important to you?

A: Go further on cultural democratization. No roadblock. I want African families, of Arab culture, to feel at home. There is not a single modernity. We have a lot to learn to respect these fragile, uprooted, exiled communities. A taboo in France is the question of communities. By dint of not wanting to think that there are communities that form on our territory, we find it hard to think that these communities want to strengthen their cultural substratum.

We are going to create in the Palace a house, a place of mediation, of care. We want to address the excluded, people with disabilities and social fragility. This project will be ready in September 2021. We have launched a competition for architects. We would like to do collective, individual practice workshops there.

Q: While you and the Palais de Tokyo are known for your openness to gender issues, what do you say to LGBT circles who regret that the exhibition "The world is burning" was mounted with Qatar, where the homosexuality punishable by death?

A: Qatar is a very new country. There is sharia in the Constitution but no application of the death penalty. The last execution dates from 1974. There is still room for improvement on the question of homosexuality, but in France, homosexuality had not been recognized until recently. In Qatar, it is completely tolerated as long as it is not demonstrative. In the 50s / 60s in France, in the United States, it was like this. And there is still a lot of homophobia in France.

We do not work with a political regime, we do not do an exhibition with the Qatar Tourist Office.

There is a very moralizing side at the moment. Where will it take us? Are we going to condemn Trump's America and stop doing exhibitions with our American colleagues? You have to have faith in the strength of cultural institutions, tools for changing mentalities, areas for sharing sensibilities.

© 2020 AFP