I am proud to announce the publication of the #Paris2024 #CulturalOlympiad evaluation.
You can find it in English here or in French here
It has been an epic task to complete this work, assessing 2,596 officially labelled cultural projects, just a month after the end of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
It is too soon to capture effects and legacies, so you need to understand this document as a macro account of what the French and Parisian Cultural Olympiad was about; what it delivered accross France and the French territories; what it intended to do, and the many ways it changed and made an impact on the thousands of organisations involved accross more than 5,000 cities.
All projects securing the official Cultural Olympiad label shared the vision to ‘link art and sport’ and the majority did so in new, unprecedented ways for France.
As I have argued since my first publications on the subject in 1999, the Cultural Olympiad is a fuzzy entity: it has no defined edges, it involves many stakeholders and presents itself under many names. Despite being little known and very poorly documented, it has evolved since 1912 (when it took the form of Olympic Art Competitions) and it is a defining aspect of the Games experience for the hundreds of thousands of people that may develop an interest in the Olympics and Paralympics but have no access to the sporting competitions.
This is only the second time that a Games Organising Committee commissions a dedicated evaluation for their Cultural Olympiad (I was also in charge of the first one, for London 2012). It is also only the third time that the official Olympic cultural programme is as thoroughly documented (if we include Mexico 1968).
It is about time we pay more attention to the determinant role artists and cultural organisations play as respondents to and interpreters of the Olympic Games experience (since Sydney 2000, also the Paralympics).
There is much more to say. What we have just published is an attempt at ensuring that the many layers of a Cultural Olympiad are captured, and its immediate impacts on the arts, culture and sports scene interrogated.
Read on and tell me what you think (and, beware: any errors you may find in this extraordinarly tight-timed report, are entirely human! :)
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Many thanks go, in particular, to Clémence Ducasse (from Paris 2024) for her dedication to ensure my access to all required data, her capacity to address all my queries and her support coordinating a truly tough final phase of reporting so that we could deliver on time. She has also been in charge of making the French version of this report possible.
Thank you too to Estelle Philibert from Studio Tangram for her speedy and incredibly professional report design, making it possible, for the first time, to have a Cultural Olympiad report presented under the official #lookoftheGames.
You can find the report in English here or in French here
#olympiadeCulturelle #culturalOlympiadEvaluation #olympicCulturalProgramme #OlympicArt
