Dear Lyne Cohen-Solal, Deputy Mayor of Paris
Dear Alain Lardet, Chairman of the Agora Design Scholarship
Dear Olivier Gabet, Director of the Museum of Decorative Arts,
Mr Pierre-Alexis Dumas, President of the Hermès Foundation
Matali Crasset, Jury Chair
Ladies and gentlemen talented designers, nominated for this 2014 Agora Prize,
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,
"One can be a poet in every field," wrote Guillaume Apollinaire, "it is enough for one to be adventurous and to go on a discovery journey."
Supporting a project, a journey, an apprenticeship, an adventure is precisely the ambition of the Agora Scholarship for Design, which, for 30 years, has enabled young talents to be poets of the object, who use forms and uses to transform our daily lives. This award, born in 1983 from the will of Alain Lardet and Claude Lévy-Soussan, is an opportunity for young designers «not to create an object but a project that allows them to enrich their knowledge and experience». These are the words of the woman who helped to highlight the creation and new talents of design in France and to make French design shine in the world. 30 years later, we also honour her with this award.
I am delighted to be here with you today to present this Agora Scholarship, which helps bring 2014 to life at the pace of design. In many ways, this year is the year of design, that of the realization of projects defined within the framework of the National Design Policy that I undertook in 2013 jointly with Arnaud Montebourg.
2014 will therefore be a great year for this design culture that we want to encourage in France through the implementation of a strong and ambitious national policy. So it is with the graphic design that we started the year by opening the day before yesterday at the Ministry of Culture and Communication the event Graphic design in France 2014. 2014 will also be placed under the double anniversary of the Atelier de Recherche et de Création du Mobilier National created 50 years ago by André Malraux and ANDAM, the national association for the development of fashion arts, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
This year will therefore be an opportunity to make design known to a wide audience and to implement the broad outlines of the design policy carried out by my Ministry.
Encouraging the design culture in France means supporting training and research. The Agora Scholarship, awarded every year to young designers from our schools, is proof of the richness of our training and the excellence of our schools. I would like to acknowledge the representatives of our cultural colleges, whose presence here today shows how much they and we all care about the professional success of their students.
To give the design of tomorrow all the means of its expression, we must therefore strengthen and make more visible the offer of higher education in design, facilitate the bridges to create poles of innovation and excellence, open our schools to the international market and foster exchanges.
This is one of the strong thrusts of the design policy supported by my Ministry.
As part of this policy, I have also made it a priority to recognize a profession that this award helps to promote. Paying particular attention to the status of independent designers within the social system of artists-authors and to the establishment of good practices among sponsors and, in the first instance, public sponsors
Finally, concerning the dissemination of the culture of design to the public, another major ambition of the national design policy, I am pleased to note that the Agora Scholarship, to which the Ministry of Culture and Communication is proud to lend its support, presents the most dynamic and innovative design: the designers of tomorrow. In this sense, it supports the work done by our valuable dissemination tools. I am thinking of our art and design schools, of course, but also of the Decorative Arts, the Centre Pompidou, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, the Mobilier National, the Cité du design and the Biennale du design de Saint-Etienne, the Villa Noailles, the Cité de la mode et du design, the VIA (Valorisation Innovation Ameublement), the APCI (Association pour la création industrielle), the Lieu du design at Designer’s Days.... Our public design collections are absolutely exceptional. A few weeks ago, I launched a working group bringing together the institutions I just mentioned so that they can work together to design a project for the dissemination and circulation of our collections throughout our territory. I will place this project at the heart of our national design policy.
I would like to salute the organizers of this Agora Scholarship and its president, Alain Lardet. You are a major designer in France. You co-founded the Agora Scholarship and created the Designer’s Days that you presided over before passing the baton to René-Jacques Mayer of the Cité de la Céramique – Sèvres Limoges. You work with passion to promote young creators and, in particular, to foster a fruitful dialogue with artisans.
I thank Matali Crasset, the president of the jury who, because she «questions the usual, the banal, the daily, the obvious, the common, the ordinary» in the manner of a George Perec, has been able to distinguish among the 5 promising projects the one that proposes the most remarkably to transform our daily lives.
I also salute the Hermès Foundation and its president, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, who has made support for creation, particularly design, a way of illustrating the unique link that Hermès has forged between transmission and innovation, know-how and creative boldness.
Finally, I also warmly thank the Decorative Arts who welcome us today and who work daily for the dissemination and promotion of design.
Philippe Apeloig, whose complete work we can discover here in a remarkable retrospective, describes designers as women and men of the «21st century», who, by the proliferation of their creations and their thought, influence our way of life.
It is this ambition to rethink our daily lives, to influence our habits and our lifestyles that we find in each of the nominees. I would like to warmly congratulate all the candidates for the quality and inventiveness of their project which are so many proposals to transform our lives. Whether they are simple and generous objects that the user is invited to produce himself, craft production techniques that mobilize the body and the hand to experience the matter, the utopian desire to inhabit the flows, redefining the density around habitable objects, or materializing the sound experience, everything is an invitation to inhabit the world differently.
Congratulations to the winner of this 2014 Agora Scholarship, Pierre Charrié, graduate of ENSCI, who offers us with his «sound surfaces» a way to give shape and life to the synesthesia so dear to Baudelaire, to this “deep unity where colors and sounds respond”.
After theEcophonic habitat, which allowed you to be a finalist in 2011, it is your project of metamorphosis of the domestic soundscape that we distinguish today. The beautiful poetic project of giving material to sound to transform our daily lives.
Exploring the paths of innovation and the unexpected in design, this is the successful bet of this Agora Scholarship that invites us to ask ourselves together the question of the world in which we want to live. And that, by giving us a glimpse of tomorrow’s design, opens up new perspectives to inhabit the world not as a user or a consumer but as a poet.
Thank you.