The experimental space of Bureau des transmissions presents various events, including lectures, workshops, performances, and games invented by local and international artists, on a daily basis. Art mediators who work with the audience make the project even more all-encompassing.
As “absolute” knowledge no longer exists today, more and more people start looking for the possibility of a dialogue and conversation in place of bare facts. To satisfy the need for critical apprehension of information, museums and other institutions study new communication formats with the public, mediators being a kind of agent between the viewer and the museum who instigate a critical reflection on the artworks and projects, by engaging visitors in a dialogue.
A forum of art interventions, Bureau des transmissions operates in multiple modes: as an ongoing performance, a program of workshops, and a meeting point. During the two and a half months of its duration, the project sees twenty art mediators—each one with unique perception, intellectual, and emotional experience—interact with the Museum’s visitors. No matter what time the viewer enters the space, they will find a mediator at Bureau.
Selected via interviews, Garage mediators have different backgrounds: people professionally trained in museum studies and those who hold a degree in art history work alongside biologists and chemists who decided to try something completely new. Such a heterogeneous team allows the project, as well as its perception, to become more multifaceted. Prior to the Bureau opening, the mediators met with the contributing artists and Garage staff—to learn more about the Museum.
Mediators and moderators, educators, cultural promoters and teachers—all Bureau des transmissions representatives have to cope with multiple challenges, making it hard to coin a single term that would define their work entirely, one possible means to come up with a precise formula being the mediators’ diaries. Throughout the exhibition, mediators document their unique experience allowing us to analyze their practice and look at the project from within.
Each mediator’s diary contains two sections. One is a record of the most memorable episodes and extravagant incidents that happened during their work at the project. The other is a study of the project itself and its outcomes: what, in the mediator’s viewpoint, was a success, and what wasn’t. You can find the mediators’ diaries below.
Initiatives across the world demonstrate that becoming acquainted with exhibitions via art mediation has a positive effect on the visitor’s experience of interacting with the institution, while also allowing for a deeper immersion in the contexts on offer. Bureau des transmissions is aiming to take its place among such projects.
