Interview with PaaLabRes

Well, there is something very paradoxical: I think that the poles of higher education are encouraged by the Ministry of Culture to open up to these aesthetics – I think that some of them want also to go in that direction – but at the same time, by the very fact of the institution and how it is organized, there is paradoxically also a rejection of the publics they would like to reach. I don’t know if it’s very clear: they would like to invite new publics, but by the very structure of these places, they reject them at the same time. For example, you have to know how to read a score or pass all the types of written exams they imposed, things like that. How do you work on that with a DJ or with someone who does electronic music, etc.? So, I say that because we are in the middle of a reflection to change the curriculum of preparatory courses towards higher education and all that. So, we are always in complexities which for me, after a long reflection, are inherent to the very structuring of these places of teaching which lock themselves in ways of doing, which in fact exclude aesthetics, and notably these so-called today’s amplified music [Musiques actuelles amplifiées]. When I say “today’s amplified music”, I am talking about all rock music in the broadest sense, hip-hop movements, which also include dance and all that – in fact it would be nice to discuss dance as well – and electronic music. And the reality is more or less the same, I think, for traditional music, I would say extra-European music to be more precise. That’s it. [silence] I don’t know if there are other thoughts?

Jean-Charles
In the development of Cefedem, we were led to completely rethink the notion of curriculum. And this seems to me to be something very important in two particular aspects. Firstly, the problem of today’s diversity of artistic expressions and their inclusion in an institution. It should be noted that in most institutions, there is generally today a diversity of practices present, but with a very strong tendency to compartmentalize these practices, preventing any circulation between them, each one staying in its own particular corner. So, the logic number one is: how can we, on the one hand, recognize the various forms of diversity as such, to respect all aspects of each practice – we take up what Gilles said about not imposing written music on oral music, written practices on oral practices and vice versa – and on the other hand, how can we ensure that all the forms of music really meet in an effective way and also work together more. That’s the first aspect. The second aspect has to do with the difficulty of higher education today of dealing with the diversity of issues: how to open education to the diversity of the world. There is a tendency in higher conservatories and universities, to face that diversity, to multiply the courses, to pile them up. And the result is that we are rather in the presence of an intellectual tourism on the part of the students, rather than a deeper visit of this diversity. So, how can we find ways to avoid intellectual tourism and still face the diversity of the world? We must probably give up the idea that all people should have access to all the diversity of the world. These seem to me to be the two main difficulties. At the Cefedem, we decided on the presence of all students in a completely common curriculum without choice of path, but at the same time centering very strongly the program on student’s pedagogical and musical projects, putting the emphasis on what individuals wanted to do, obliging the students to go towards diversity, but letting them choose what diversity they wanted to visit.

Nicolas
I would like to add one more thing. Obviously, our participation in PaaLabRes is fed by everything we went through before, but I remember some instances of a kind of conjunction of reflections: a) a summer seminar at Cefedem in which the question of the existence of a research laboratory on what we were doing had been raised at one point, and then finally not decided or not initiated; b) the moment when we made a long trip with Gilles in the car to go and play in Montpellier, if I remember correctly, in which this question of the existence of research and therefore of a laboratory that would allow us to bring it to life came up; and c) a discussion with Jean-Charles afterwards. Practically in the same month, there was this conjunction coming from several places, about the possibility of creating a research laboratory in order to bring about words, actions, documentation, reflection and sharing of reflection, etc. And this is what led to the existence of PaaLabRes after some writing work on an initial text. And I wanted to add also that it seems to me that the relationships in any case of PaaLabRes are extremely strong with some small places. PaaLabRes is rather a minority practice and has relationships with minority places. For example, we discuss PaaLabRes a lot in a laboratory of Educational Sciences in Paris 8 University, because I am there and what we do interests these people a lot. But obviously it is still not very visible! I can testify to this because I am the one who brings PaaLabRes when I go to these types of meeting. But there are a lot of agreements in principle, even in fact on the ways of doing research that are not linked to musical practices, for example. All the points that Jean-Charles evoked in PaaLabRes, which tries to bring together this and that, are elements of conflict in many places that are more in the majority, so those which generate more opinions on them, those which produce more publications, those which have more visibility and all that. But at the same time, we have relationships with centers of higher learning. outside references to “art”, with a lot of things to be developed. I rather talk about Educational Sciences because my thesis work is in this domain. So, it’s in those places that I bring a lot of elements that PaaLabRes develops and that PaaLabRes has allowed me to develop myself. At the same time, I can’t really distinguish PaaLabRes from my practice at the Cefedem and from my militant practice. Today, there is a movement going on of the occupation of cultural places with quite a lot of demands for their future and for a development of cultural policies. So we have a fanfare in which we have more than a hundred people on the mailing list, and for the moment, we are doing rehearsals with 40 or 50. And of course, I’m taking part with all that PaaLabRes has brought me and I’m trying to write a diary of these rehearsals, because it’s really extremely interesting the way we try to make a self-managed band with more than 50 or 60 people, with not always the same people present at the same time. And in fact, it’s a kind of continuous feeding that allows that to happen. In any case, PaaLabRes’ relationships with higher education are sometimes stronger with domains that don’t discuss artistic or musical practices. It’s a kind of weird thing, but it says a certain number of things about the artistic and musical milieu, at least in France. I will also finish on the international relations. Perhaps we fantasize about them a little, but there is a lot of literature in English which interests us enormously, and part of the work of PaaLabRes was to translate a certain number of texts that we found extremely interesting. And so, perhaps we fantasize a little, or I fantasize a little, about how to think about higher education in the arts on the other side of the Atlantic.

Jean-Charles
It should be noted that recently the 3 hours video of the third edition of PaaLabRes “Break Down the Walls” was shown in a seminar lead by Vlatko Kucan on improvisation at the Hamburg Musikhochschule in Germany. There are strong links between PaaLabRes editions and a similar experimental publication in the United States “Open Space Magazine”, edited by Ben Boretz. With Nicolas, we have participated to several seminars on the arts at Paris I University, Orpheus Institute in Ghent (Belgium), Exploratorium Berlin, and Côte d’Azur University. And with Gilles we have participated to the last annual meeting of CEPI (Centre Européen Pour l’Improvisation). So, we are not completely cut from artistic discussions on an international basis.

Gilles
I would like to remind you of one small detail, which is that we are completely independent, that we do not receive any funding. So, all this is done in a completely voluntary way by everyone. This may not seem very important, but it also contributes to the fact that there are ups and downs. The involvement must be very strong to hold this kind of project. Generally, the project is well supported by the collective, but there are two people who are a little more committed than the others in there, it is Jean-Charles and Nicolas certainly. But I think that we all participate in it, it is something that we hold dear. I think that when each one of us makes interventions on the right or on the left, on various courses, or at the CNSMD, or things like that, we quote PaaLabres [www.paalagres.org] so it’s a link that people will be able to go and see. And I think that PaaLabRes was also an opportunity to create a link, a connection between networks, I don’t know if the term is right, in any case according to the each one’s acquaintances. This means that within PaaLabRes we can cross the views of people with whom we have worked, in particular in connection with artistic practices. And we realize that most of the musicians we know – we have also worked with choreographers and so on – are also involved in the question of the transmission. And that through discussions and interviews, all this intersects, and we realize that there are many questions which are common and which cross in particular the aesthetics or even the various arts, dance, theater, painting. Through PaaLabRes, I remember the work we did at Ramdam [a cultural center near Lyon] where we worked with dancers, a painter and musicians. We looked for ways to work together and it raised a lot of questions. And thus, we don’t have all the answers, but it has allowed us to trigger meetings and reflections and it has connected people who continue to say to each other: “if we have things to say, we can go and discuss this with PaaLabRes”. So, it’s a place of connection too and it will become more so little by little, because we are starting to settle in the long term with the third edition, maybe a place of reference for people who will want to look for information. But it is a huge job, a considerable one. It’s not easy to keep it up over time.

Jean-Charles
Just to say that I have a few students every year from Cefedem as a support for writing their dissertations. And it is obvious that PaaLabRes and its three editions are a fundamental reservoir for these young people.

FAST45
Thank you. To sum up what you said about the relationship between PaaLabRes in higher education institutions. It seems to me that, in particular, this is what Gilles was saying about the fact that PaaLabRes is an association but does not have specific funding. One could say that from a reflexive point of view as well as from a logistical point of view, it also relies on Cefedem and the Villeurbanne ENM – but not only, I think of Paris 8 University -, on institutions of higher education which also allow PaaLabRes to exist. And in return, maybe all this might not exist in the strict sense in these different institutions, but in return they allow PaaLabRes to exist and to feed, as you just said Jean-Charles, these institutions in any case.

Pascal
Yes, I’m going to continue with that. That is to say that I also feel that students have a desire to go their own way and to get out of the formatting established by the Ministry or by the curricula. We can observe this formatting of excellence in the diffusion milieu as well. As an example, I noted an excerpt from the text of the Ministry of Culture’s website, “to multiply the cultural offer of excellence”. That is to say, there is upfront this notion of excellence that must be a kind of label. And so, it excludes a whole part of the personal pathway, of searching, of trial and error and all that. And I have the impression that our students, today, want to be on their own personal path, to create their own path. And I think that there is a desire to break out of the molds they are in.

Nicolas
To also add the fact that behind the question, there is this kind of thing that we call “art” or thing that we call “the artist”, it was very present in the questionnaire too. I find it interesting that PaaLabRes, in any case, works on the artistic practices in act in addition, [Paa = Pratiques artistiques en acte]. It’s this double term that insists on the fact that art doesn’t exist in itself, but is made, constructed, experimented with, and in general with several people, or most of the time, in any case, with several people on a large chain of events, even the painter in his little atelier is perhaps not alone for that long. And behind the question, there is also a kind of very strong undertone or implicit assumption that art or creative work or artists (etc.), would do some “good” to society. It’s great that there’s art. It would be great if there were artists, etc. And that there is also a kind of critical vigilance – I don’t know if it should be called that – on a certain number of possible drifts (and drifts that are already in place) of this excellence that excludes people, that disqualifies people in fact, the fact that you can’t call yourself a musician without having studied at a music school. I always use the example of the Creole reggae band from Reunion Island that I play with. It took me two years to get them to agree to call themselves musicians. They played reggae, that was all. They couldn’t call themselves musicians, because only one of them had been to school (meaning a music school), and not for very long. Not for very long, because he left after three months! And so, that excluded them from calling themselves musicians. On the other hand, they played reggae, they were quite… they had a long and extensive knowledge of this music (etc.), but they didn’t consider themselves musicians. We would have two rehearsals a week, two concerts a month, but they were not musicians. So, this kind of thing is really… with forms of boxes like “you are in, or you are out”. The orchestra was built with capitalist industrialization (etc.) with terms that resembled the military. So how do we manage to play with it, to divert it, especially in orchestras that try to be self-managed? There are forms of entertainment or detour of attention. We can choose what we talk about and the issues we need to discuss. And art also participates in a form of anesthesia, of sterilization of a certain number of questions – well can participate in that – and there is somehow a form of critical vigilance that needs to be developed. The dimensions of research or of reflexive hindsight on the practice by the practitioners themselves seem to me to be an essential element to do this. So, the sort of underlying notion of art, of the benefits of art, makes invisible a certain number of things on which one must be relatively careful, well in the positive sense of the term. My words may sound very critical, but they are meant to be rather constructive. At least I try!

Jean-Charles
It’s obvious to me that people who are around artistic practices think that their activity is essential. I’m not sure that the majority of people think it’s essential, but of course it’s something that must be measured. In any case, what seems obvious to me is that the emphasis that we want to put on artistic practices changes the definition of art. The problem with the questionnaire that we were given is that when it is mentioned the term “art”, nobody knows what it is. There are 2 million conceptions of what art is. Each one can decide what is art, from Duchamp to I don’t know who, to Beethoven! And so, by putting the accent on the practices, we are really interested in the very fabrication of art, how it is done, with whom, under what conditions. And in this sense, for example, the notion of democracy becomes completely different from that which was given by the debates which took place in the Sixties and Eighties, between Malraux and Jack Lang, which were centered with Malraux on the contemplation of the works, the access of the general public to the contemplation of the art works, and perhaps with Jack Lang the access of the general public to a diversity, the acknowledgement of the diversity of artistic practices. And by emphasizing the democratization of the practices themselves, one questions in particular several notions which are not questioned precisely, that is to say the extraordinary hegemony of the scene over any other activity – the presentation of art on stage or in museums for other artistic forms – at the expense of the practices themselves. And by putting the accent on that which is happening on stage, we have something of the order of “the end justifies the means” and therefore we are not going to look at what is happening before. And even within this framework, many people don’t mind that the practices can sometimes resemble, as Nicolas said, “military” forms of practice. So as soon as we ask the question of the democratization of the practices themselves, the notion of excellence also takes a hit because if we want to make people participate in a more egalitarian and horizontal way, we run the strong risk of not reaching the great virtuosity that we can observe in the art of the 19th century, for example, in the European high art of the 19th century.

So effectively, we made the test, and we manage just by listening to the mix of the thing, by the means of the sound, to recalculate that in times. And more and more, there are mixes even in metal, with the most recent bands, there are jaw harps, there are sounds that come from elsewhere, there are even concrete sounds, and then there is electronic music. So, in fact, it’s funny because there are styles that stay a little bit frozen in one place – I’m talking about metal, but I think it’s the same thing in a lot of music – and others that will mix more and more, but these mixes are constructive, it’s not stuff where everything gets dull. So, things continue to evolve. I think that the good thing about this music, which is also the music in the making, in perpetual construction, is that we are not in a repertoire, it is always things that are evolving, but that will be fed by many things. It doesn’t come from nowhere. And we still don’t know what tomorrow’s new musical style will be. And that’s what’s exciting about artistic education, that is to say, you can’t freeze a teaching because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. We can be nourished by the past, but, first of all, artistic education is complex, because finally, what do we propose to a student? It is emancipation. That means that at the end of a training, the student will no longer need a teacher, in fact, he or she will be able to manage on their own. In fact, we teach them to train themselves to not need us anymore. We can perhaps say it in another way, but there is also that, it is to teach them not to listen to the rules. Finally, it is all that which is complicated in the artistic teaching, it seems to me, but it is that which is enthralling also. We can’t freeze things by saying: “this will be it” because tomorrow, it could be something else. And here we see that there is a growing interaction between image and music. The image is full of aesthetics so that also changes the game. In the practices of today’s amplified music, whatever the aesthetics in the broad sense, it is all the time linked to the image. In fact, even today, if we launch music without talking about the image, we are already missing something, it seems to me. I’m sorry, I must go, but I would have gladly continued this discussion!

FAST45
Thank you Gilles.

And at the same time, they write poetry and all that, it mixes and it’s not just focused on one class, but on the kids who, for example, are going to produce small cells, who are going to demonstrate them to other classes and who are going to teach them how to do it. And it’s the kids who are going to show them how to build small cells and so on. It’s spreading throughout the school and poetry will be added to it. And I have the impression that it is by this means that we will be able to make people make their own music. We really refused a school orchestra like we see everywhere, namely, cramming a piece during all the year, to make a blues in one year, we did not want that. We wanted these kids to be able to manipulate everything and have a culture of sound in this school. And I say this in relation to the fact that trial and error and experimentation have never been valued in our lives as musicians. What is valued? In fact, it’s a finished product. Finished products, excellence, will be subsidized. The things that are going to be funded are always the things that are at the top of the pyramid, whereas valuing experimentation, in the end, would be the best thing to do in all schools.

Jean-Charles
It should be noted that in the third edition of PaaLabRes, “Break Down the Walls”, there are several examples of this research project lead by Pascal, Philippe and Gérald.

Nicolas
We have always tried, in any case in each of the editions, depending on the entries we had for the theme of the edition, to put at equal level – well I cannot define “level” and it would be necessary to define “equality”, so these are not the right terms – productions of professionals in their professional context, therefore with a form of excellence, productions of professionals in uncomfortable contexts, students productions, fragile productions, rather experimental stuff, etc. And that we tried to have, each time in any case, a form of putting forward these experiments, this trial and error, etc.

Pascal
I agree with what you say, Jean-Charles. And I would like to give another example of what could get people to work on this: there is a French teacher in a high school who contacted me the other day, because they are working on a novel. It turns out that this novel is about the clarinet, through a whole period from the 1930’s to nowadays, and therefore through jazz and all that – that’s why we met. So, I work with this class, punctually. These people are used to writing texts, and these are students who like to write, so the goal is to say to them: “Here, we’re going to use your writings and you’re also going to make music with that”. So, these students who never made music will finally be able to create, and in a week, we will all meet for four hours to manipulate sound objects along with their own writing. And I have the impression that in our music schools, which are a bit like sanctuaries, where only a few people come from the whole population of Villeurbanne, even if we have beginners who are from Villeurbanne. In fact, we have very few students from popular culture who will stay with us for very long. We really only have a very small public like that, and we have to seek them out, not necessarily so that they come to the music school, but it’s up to us to free up hours to do projects with all these kids. And I know that next year, I will free up an hour for elementary schools, an hour for high schools to do projects that are not necessarily year-long, but punctually to be able to tell them that it is easy to fabricate sound material. We can all do it. And afterwards, we must find formal protocols to allow them to enter all this. Frankly, it’s quite exciting and enthralling. Here, I wanted to point that out.

Nicolas
I think that there is a question for me around the participation of the greatest number of people making music. I find that it is in connection with a form of precariousness also of the whole of the professions and in particular of the professions of the relation and of human beings who work with other human beings. And it seems to me that this precarization leads to the extinction of many forms of practice because of the fatigue of having to do it or of having to rely on other types of income to be able to continue to do what we like. So, for example, the hour you’re talking about, Pascal, is one-sixteenth of your time, but it’s still a rather infinitesimal quantity that you manage to tinker with and that you manage to bring out and that you manage to…

Pascal
Yes, but if a hundred teachers free up one hour a week, that’s a lot of hours in a year!

Nicolas
Yes, absolutely. For me, any school – and in particular a higher education art center – should be responsible for a form of ecology of practices and for the existence of a diversity of practices, so that the students, when they leave that school, can really choose their own artistic practices, their own ways of doing things. Not the discipline “music” or “music with circus” or “music with circus in this way”, but the way of doing, the way of experimenting, the way of fabricating. And so, to open them to seek knowledge, to make them experiment in a “secure”, comfortable framework in which one can fail – it is even welcome to fail, because it often allows to reflect. And so, a higher education art center should have a kind of charter for safeguarding the ecology of practices. And it seems to me that these things that are done on the periphery, that never reinterrogate the center, are more and more in danger. The kind of things that, in fact, you can do as long as you have enough energy, but that after a while, sleeping two hours a night, it is not viable. And so, there is a need to have a kind of vigilance to the forms of precariousness of all that makes a human group hold together, so I speak from the musical perspectives, but it seems to me that it is much broader than just musical practices.

Jean-Charles
Simply to note that this was one of the concerns we had at the Cefedem just before my retirement. It was very clear that the future of this institution meant that we should not only concentrate on teaching, which is necessarily extremely institutionalized, but that we should strongly expand to something that we called mediation in the perspectives of Antoine Hennion. And proposals were made a little after I left going in this direction, which were completely rejected by the Ministry of Culture, and especially by the musical milieu, represented in this process by the musicians’ unions. This seems to me to be something quite serious in the context of our society because there is a real need for this training of musicians in this idea of mediation, and obviously this goes hand in hand with what you were saying, Nicolas. There is the need for this to be perpetuated in jobs that are recognized as being of public utility and remunerated in the public sector.

Nicolas
Absolutely!

But what did that mean? It created a whole system of cultural administration, and therefore it is not surprising that mediation is considered from the point of view of these people who administer the cultural policy of our country. What is absolutely necessary is that it is the musicians themselves who are the mediators in practices that involve, as we said, in an experimental way, different publics, to give them access to musical practices and to the very extended experiments that Pascal was talking about a minute ago, for example.

Jean-Charles
I know a lot of experiments taking place outside of France. For example, Peter Renshaw in London in his action with the project “Connect” and there is Lucy Green in England who does a lot of experiments in this direction. And you can find this kind of projects everywhere in Europe. In France, despite the creation of the CFMI [Centre de Formaion des Musiciens Intervenants], and the recognition of “musicians in residence in primary schools”, we are still very conservative in the institutions, it seems to me, in the institutions of musical practice. Perhaps less so in the universities.

Nicolas
It seems to me that it is one of the interests to develop, in any case, or to develop what we call – Samuel (the interviewer) said it earlier – the “making people do”, that is to say to put the students, if we speak about higher education, in the framework of making others do something. So, this can take place in schools as well as in many other places. And for that, there is a minimum of vigilance, in any case, it seems to me, to learn to situate one’s action somewhere in some context, from the point of view of what the student is capable of doing or wants to do or feels interested in exploring or experimenting. Therefore, to situate oneself. To situate the place of the action. So, if it’s in a school, in such and such a place, in such and such a part of the city or such and such a part of the countryside, which since the Revolution has been crossed by different rationalities, etc., then it is a question to situate oneself, to situate one’s action and afterwards, to have enough elements or support to carry out a critique. If I take the example of the fanfare I mentioned, it’s quite interesting how I see myself taking on roles, and it’s just scary in fact. I see myself taking on the role of a musician who is “battle-hardened” on a certain number of things, who would like the product to be more polished than just what is being produced, whereas that is not at all the object, and the whole band agrees that it is best not to work on that, but I feel that I have conditioned reflexes, which were conditioned by my training and the way I was forced to build myself in order to survive in that milieu. So, I have that stuff creeping up. And on the other side, I have worked quite a bit on anarchism and self-management, etc. and the fanfare claims to be self-managed. And again, I have stuff that is coming up from… but in fact, this, this is not at all…

Pascal
For example, tuning the band? [laughs]

Nicolas
No, because I deconstructed that. But the place of the solos or the kind of balance between the jumps, etc., a lot of things. In fact, I feel that it’s creeping up and I realize it and I say to myself: “no, in fact that’s not the goal!” And I also have a lot of stuff in the form of knowledge that I have built up on self-management that would make me at one point whistle and say: “red card, we have to discuss because there is in fact violence of domination that is exercised and that is just unacceptable”. Except that after a while, if I do it, who am I to say that? Shouldn’t this be discussed a little? I have a lot of conditioned reflexes of a person who could be said to know about a certain number of things, but which do not correspond at all to the action that is being set up. And I am able to do this because we have established the principle that when a person conducts a piece, he/she has to remains silent during the rehearsals of all the other pieces. So, at times, I am obliged to shut my mouth and therefore to observe, to have desires, but to say to myself: “no, don’t say anything”. And therefore, to be able to take a step back on the action that is being done, and this is because I have built tools in my training, in my contacts and especially in PaaLabRes. But this is the result of a long training. And I think that it could go a little faster if we nourished the students with analyses of practices and make them analyze their own practices by themselves, when they are in the process of making something, to analyze what is being played out. This fabrication of a practice, it can vary between the ultra-fascist to ultra-libertarian type with a whole panel which can be very diverse. We need to develop tools, theoretical elements and reflexive feedbacks. Therefore, it should be stressed that we need time. We need time to analyze these things and especially to analyze what doesn’t work, because not everything works super well. It’s a sort of thing that could be developed a bit more in institutions of higher education in art.

FAST45
It seems to me that in what was said, there is nevertheless the necessity to consider art as a logic, a rather important social practice. You raised economic, social, human systems of relation between the people who make something, and it seems to me that the fact of posing the art without a big “A” would require to go further, notably in the questions that we submit to you.

Nicolas
For me, we need to clarify the term of institutionalization, of the building of institutions, with ups and downs, births and deaths, and that the death of an institution is perhaps not so serious as that if it comes to participate in the ecology or the ecosystem (etc.) of things. There is a form of necessity of constant institutionalization, of always questioning the instituting that comes to reshuffle the cards, to question the instituted, etc. And that, right now, I think that it can be developed, and I don’t know on what human scale, but we know how to do it quite well in small groups or small institutions. And as soon as it becomes too large or too numerous, or too much, etc., we are very quickly trapped by the fact that the instituting dynamic is either attenuated or rendered non-existent or only develops at the margin. And so, it’s recreating a little something on the side, etc. There are really things to think about in terms of ecological systems or ecosystems – I don’t know what the term is for the survival of species and subspecies within species, etc. So, it’s not just the institution that’s important, it’s the institutionalization. It is the process that counts, just as we say that it is the making of music and the making of art that is interesting, it is the making of the institution in a dynamic and living process that is interesting. I find that there are plenty of alternatives, it’s swarming everywhere, there are alternatives that are starting to take hold and that are relatively interesting, under many radars. And at the same time, we have monstrous institutions that are hegemonic and hyper-dominant in the sense of eating people and their energy.

FAST45
And perhaps also to make the link with what Jean-Charles said or what was said a little bit about projections, it is that the “ideas” in quotation marks – for example Jean-Charles, you spoke of horizontality more than verticality, to develop more horizontal logics – it is also things that are recuperated by the institutions in quotation marks, the “big institutions” of which you spoke Nicolas. These “ideas” are also part of their own flagship, and this does not mean at all that they develop a reflection at the level of individuals and that it brings more social happiness, to say that in a somewhat caricatural way! So, in fact, the way in which “horizontality” is made, in quotation marks, or horizontalization, the way in which the logics of mediation are made as they were raised, the way of making music, etc., I have the impression that they are always to be put back on the drawing board in order not to fall into logics only of vocabulary, or even of change at the margin of the practices.

Nicolas
I will try to formalize what we were getting at. What I’m going to say concerns the role of everyone, but perhaps more specifically, concerns the institutions of higher education in the arts and in particular in the context of the musical practices that are the place in which PaaLabRes works. It seems to me that there is an absolute necessity to become aware of the hegemonic forms of domination, etc. and of the violence that they give rise to, and therefore to construct critiques of these systems, this constitutes a kind of first stage. The second stage, in view of that, is to try to build alternatives. And I think that PaaLabRes, for example, is one of the alternatives in view of a certain number of things that we have been able to identify in the world of musical practices and the way in which research was carried out. So, building alternatives is the second stage. And the third is to criticize these same alternatives with regard to all the criticisms that we had already made of the current system and others, because obviously, the alternatives that we construct are imperfect, etc. There is a sort of three-step system: to continue to criticize, to construct alternatives and even to criticize these alternatives. So, we do it a little bit in PaaLabRes, it’s not very visible, because we see all the lacks, all the things, all the people who are not given the floor, the people for whom it’s difficult to go and get interviews, even though they might have developed very interesting experiences. We can’t do it, because we don’t have the time, but at the same time if we don’t have the time, it’s because we didn’t take the time. Finally, there are quite interesting things, if we take the institutions of higher education of the arts, they should be obligated to make a criticism of the current world, to make people build alternatives and to build themselves alternatives that the students experience, alternatives that he students themselves build, alternatives of the future world they contribute to create. In this way, they would participate in the invention of the world in the process of being made and to equip themselves (ourselves too) on the criticism of these same alternatives so that they do not end up reproducing the thing. It seemed to me that we had already reached this point earlier, these three stages: critique, alternative and critique of alternatives, which is a kind of virtuous circle.

FAST45
Thank you Nicolas for these concluding words and thanks to Pascal, Jean-Charles and Gilles.