Open / Ground : professional days
OPEN/GROUND: four days spent working through the gap
Self-taught artists operate with their own logics. Institutions with their own habits.
In hip hop dance, voguing, house, waacking, and many other artistic practices long kept at the margins, self-taught artists have developed their own aesthetic codes, creative dynamics, modes of transmission and ways of building community. Their work is increasingly circulating within institutions, yet those who create it still rarely access programming or leadership roles. Many remain in precarious conditions, insufficiently supported to create in decent circumstances, when their practice is not at risk of disappearing altogether.
This raises urgent questions for the public cultural sector: how can these artists and their communities be better recognised and supported? How can resources be distributed in an already fragile context? How can programming and audiences be actively renewed?
Over four days, at the CCN and Hôtel Pasteur, encounters, round tables, workshops and tool-sharing sessions will bring together artists, programmers, cultural policy-makers, educators and all those concerned by these issues, to examine inherited cultural hierarchies and build new shared ground.
Open to arts professionals and anyone concerned. Free, registration required. Full programme announced in September.
The programme
/ 13 October — Open/Ground #1
CCN, St-Melaine, 10am–5:30pm
Process, 10am–1:30pm: Artists from France, Europe and beyond share work in progress, exactly as it stands, with no set format: a sketch, a developed model, or simply a conversation over coffee. With Bouzid Aït Atmane (FR), Ergao (CN), Aleyna Demir (CH), Baba / Jérôme Oussou (FR), Inés Sybille (ES), Eshidoreen Paradiso (NO).
Tools, 2:30–3:30pm — Intersectional and Institutional Indicators, with Florence Cherrier. How can we measure what a cultural policy says about itself when it claims to be inclusive? Florence Cherrier presents research conducted in Rennes in October 2025 as part of the Médusa / Mythologies inachevées residency, led by associated artists NSDOS, Sofian Jouini and Nosfell. The intersectional commitments stated by cultural institutions are often difficult to assess, for lack of tools to make them measurable. The workshop presents a series of indicators developed at two levels, individual career paths and institutions themselves, to examine who programmes, who makes decisions and which criteria actually shape artistic and institutional choices.
Talk, 3:30–5:30pm — « Quelle(s) place(s) / Faire place ? » A generation of artists is already here: active, organised and visible in spaces that institutions have not always engaged with — battles, clubs, self-organised networks and parallel circuits built without waiting for institutional recognition. The question is not how to integrate them into existing circuits, but what their presence reveals about the ways institutions operate: their tools, rhythms and frameworks for recognition, what they choose to see and what they continue to overlook. Making room can mean welcoming people into an existing framework, but it can also mean framing, normalising and sometimes absorbing them, to the point of dissolving what made a practice distinctive. Making room can require a genuine willingness to give up power, time and space without retaining control over them.
/ 14 October — Open/Ground #2
CCN, St-Melaine, 10am–5:30pm
Process: Artists from France, Europe and beyond share work in progress, exactly as it stands, with no set format: a sketch, a developed model, or simply a conversation over coffee.
- 10am–1:30pm: Jeannette Agbo (TG), Malick / Shelter (FR), Chris Fargeot / Kastet (FR), Moncef Zebiri (FR), Ashley Biscette (FR)
- 2:30–5:30pm: Mehdi Baki (FR), Lúcia Baronesa Afonso (PT), Sofian Jouini (FR), Gelya Andry (UA), Karel Koueleny (CG), Deep Das (IN)
/ 15 October — Open/Ground #3
CCN, St-Melaine, 10am–5:30pm
Process, 10am–1:30pm: Artists from France, Europe and beyond share work in progress, exactly as it stands, with no set format: a sketch, a developed model, or simply a conversation over coffee. With Benson A’Kuyie (DE), Naoko Tozawa (FR), Mounia Nassangar (FR), Philippe Almeida (FR), Karim Bouheudjeur (FR), Niki Awandee (SE).
Tools, 2:30–3:30pm — Attitudes Toolkit and FAIRE PLAY Platform. Two tools designed to give organisations and professionals concrete points of reference. The first part presents the toolkit developed as part of the European Attitudes project, a set of resources to support professionals working on projects related to hip hop dances across Europe. The second focuses on FAIRE PLAY, a free, collaborative media platform dedicated to hip hop dances, the underground and counterculture, initiated by the FAIR-E collective and released as an open-source project. In response to a history largely transmitted without its own archives — oral, scattered and sometimes at risk of disappearing with those who experienced it — FAIRE PLAY approaches archiving as an issue of cultural transmission: documenting a culture, its pioneers, gestures and spaces without freezing it in place or having it narrated from the outside.
Talk, 3:30–5:30pm — « La politique des noms » A discussion around the difficulty of naming autodidact dances rooted in hip hop, club cultures, queer and diasporic dynamics. The starting point: in the 1990s, a generic label was adopted as a matter of political caution rather than through reflection on the practices themselves. The term “hip hop” was then considered too contentious, particularly because of rap, to appear in official documents. Cultural organisations subsequently adopted the generic term, either for convenience or to bring everything together under a single label, including whacking. In the process, the specificity of each practice was obscured, along with the educational and political stakes they carry. What concerns us is not finding the right term, but understanding why the need to name so often comes from institutions, and so rarely from the people concerned. What does this need reveal about the power to name, categorise and define others?
/ 16 October — Bodies and Care
Savoirs du mouvement : in partnership with the CND / Centre national de la danse, a day dedicated to health in hip hop dances, led by Linda Hayford, CND associate artist and member of the FAIR-E collective. The event brings autodidact knowledge into dialogue with approaches to care, with the aim of better taking into account the specificities of dancers’ individual paths.
16 October | From 10am | Hôtel Pasteur | By invitation