Mr Prefect, dear Thomas Campeaux,

Dear Philippe Bélaval, President of the National Monuments Centre,

Dear Joel Andrianomearisoa,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Dear friends,

It is a great pleasure to inaugurate, here among you, the first work from the New Worlds artistic creation support program. You are all familiar with this call for projects and its original modalities of support for the design and production of artistic works.

This method was unprecedented: it is a program that has been imagined so that everything starts with artists, their vision and their sensitivity, allowing them to create according to their desires, their needs and the progress of their thought, their work or their inspiration. In a word, this program offers artists – alone or in groups – to let their imagination run wild, beyond all the usual classifications of disciplines. And then he also offers them the support they need to complete their project.

With more than 3,200 projects submitted following the first call for expressions of interest, I am pleased to see that New Worlds has attracted interest from artists of all ages, backgrounds and disciplines…

I would like to acknowledge the remarkable work done by all the members of the artistic committee, under the coordination of Bernard Blistène. Their expertise and passionate looks have retained the most promising projects, ensuring a precious diversity. I would like to thank them all the more because the health crisis has in no way dulled their commitment; on the contrary, it has only strengthened their relevance.

Dear friends, this moment is particularly precious and moving, since the work proposed by Joël Andrianomearisoa is the first realization of these new Worlds – which strengthen the place of artists at the heart of our landscapes and monuments.

This work, entitled Au rythme de nos désirs, dansons la vague du temps, is a poetic injunction to action and movement. The letters are no longer laid out on paper, but they stand in a face-to-face – an almost intimate face-to-face – with the viewer. They establish a singular dialogue with those who observe them. For this monumental work, these eleven words inscribed in metal – and I quote Bernard Blistène – stand “as an inextinguishable desire to establish a relationship with those who look at them”. But the address that is made to us, this apostrophe of metal, is very different from the giant typographies that usually punctuate our looks, as so many injunctions to consume.

Here, it is an invitation full of poetry, both very intimate and eminently visible, a form of lace and yet monumental, an invitation to reverie as much as to dance…

Joël Andrianomearisoa thus reinvents the place of the work of art and that of the words of the artist-poet in society.

And it is not insignificant that this work is presented to the general public as part of the opening of the Cité internationale de la langue française. This concomitance shows the artistic effervescence of the francophone space, of which you, dear Joël Andrianomearisoa, are one of the brilliant representatives. And it embodies the ambition that we have for artists in France, both witnesses of social change, awakeners of conscience and purveyors of dreams.

Thank you.

Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, minister of culture