notion : Mediation
Mediation
« The French term ‘médiation’ implies the idea of solving a conlict. In the tradition of ‘culture democratization’, ‘mediation’ aims to help people connect with art and to enjoy it, supposedly resolving a conlict between people ignoring the codes (therefore not enjoying contemporary art, for example) and artworks that are meant to be interesting per se. To do so, médiation explains art, and risks reducing its polysemic discourse to a single ‘correct’ interpretation.
Whereas médiation, in its traditional understanding, delivers ‘a correct’ interpretation authorized by the institution, in a vertical way (through canonic forms such as the guided tour), critical gallery education aims at developing a dialogical relationship, following a more horizontal model.
Contrary to the classical approach to gallery education, we [Microssillons collective] believe that art can be used to create productive intellectual or political conlict, to open a debate between citizens, to discuss political and social issues. To accomplish this, there is no need to promote the greatness of an artwork or to simplify its meaning; rather, one must work with it, sometimes manipulate it, to find friction points that can generate debate.
[...] the conlicts that occur during the projects can be considered as being in many ways more interesting than a ‘happy consensus’ and are signs of a vital and open dialogical process. » (Desvoignes, 2015).