A museum to rebuild reality

The Frac’s project for the years to come is to go out and encounter audiences, develop inclusive policies with a social investment approach, and define itself as an institution helping to contribute a conception of the world we inhabit to public policies and citizens.

A Manifesto for a century:

Consider the Frac Centre-Val de Loire as a laboratory of feminist democracy
Deeply feminist. Unconditionally feminist. A democracy that allows us to reflect daily on the fundamental question worth asking: that of women’s liberty.

Rewrite history from inclusive points of view, taking into account the geographic and anthropological dimension of narratives
We will not write our history of Europe alone in a “continent-all” perspective. Europe is the culmination of narratives from around the world, and our history of art, of images and of architecture come to us via Africa, the Americas, the Arab worlds, Asia and beyond.

Defend the right to experimentation
The Frac Centre-Val de Loire is at the service of artists and architects—their space for doubting and daring to take paths that branch out. We do not expect artists to give us answers, but to roam for us in the infinite field of questions.

Redefine our relationship with audiences
It is urgent to advocate not for rising attendance, but to the contrary, for diminishing the prominence of this objective. A radical change of perspective: welcoming in smaller audiences, but welcoming them with hospitality and kindness. This is the main lesson that care workers have taught us recently. We need to spend more time with our visitors, accompany them, talk to them, listen to them, get to know them.

Build public space
The Frac Centre-Val de Loire needs to become a space of possibilities, an agora in which anything can be said. One of the most urgent matters of our time is the disappearance of places for speech, expression, debate, disputation. To rebuild reality must become a space for our contemporary disputations, involving audiences, artists and architects, works and politics.

Affirm equivalency in intelligence and fight the hierarchy of diplomas or knowledge accumulation
Audiences must become actors in programming and activities. They are the new curators in the wake of new commissioners.

Welcome foreigners in, with the fundamental implications this has for our identity
Seek out networks beyond the world of culture: Cultures du Coeur [national association at the center of social transformation through culture], Planning Familial [popular education feminist movement], the Teranga association [social guidance], ASELQO centers [Orléans-based social, educational and leisure activities], COJIE [collective supporting isolated foreign minors], etc.

Impacting the world
The Frac Centre-Val de Loire cannot remain deaf to the cries of reality. The lack of reaction from cultural institutions at the time of the migratory crises, to give just one example, creates a sense of having become fortresses impervious to the “fragile skin of the world” (Jean-Luc Nancy). It is our responsibility to contribute, hand in hand with public authorities and citizens, to repairing—in the sense used by Kader Attia—societal divisions.

Construct the world
Through its specificity, as a collection of art and architecture, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire is a tool at the service of public policies for territorial development. Each work at the Frac is an idea awaiting activation at the service of constructing forms of living together. A Frac (regional contemporary art collection) is not a temple for the sanctification of works, but a space of expertise to create our world one day at a time.  

Abdelkader Damani,
Director