Enterprising culture

resource record · 20 January 2025

Enterprising culture: the eighth International Meetings in Bordeaux

A first edition in Bordeaux. The 2025 meetings brought artists, business leaders, researchers and public decision-makers together around the relationship between culture, economic life and digital change.

The programme was built as an international conversation on creation-related questions. Its working groups and studies were intended to develop practical proposals, while the Bordeaux edition placed cultural activity within a wider social and economic context.

The central theme treated culture as both a distinctive form of expression and a shared resource. It asked how creative talent can be supported, how organisations can develop sustainable models and how cultural policy can respond to technological change without losing sight of participation and public value.

Four questions for cultural enterprise

The programme focused on four connected areas:

• encouraging organisational and entrepreneurial models that help creative talent develop;
• diversifying the ways creation can be financed;
• considering greater coherence in European tax approaches to cultural activity;
• accompanying an ethical and responsible use of data.

Together, these questions connected cultural work to the conditions in which it is produced, funded, circulated and encountered.

Programme overview

The meetings included a prologue of public discussions, followed by sessions at the Grand Théâtre of Bordeaux. The programme addressed data and culture, the changing role of creators, the cultural and creative sector, and cooperation between entrepreneurs and artists in the city of tomorrow.

Prologue

• Discussion on the condition of cultural industries, held with an academic partner.
• Conversation on data, urban design and the future city.

International meetings

• Opening session: Enterprising culture.
• Data and culture: the role of algorithms.
• Are creators entrepreneurs like any other?
• Building the cultural and creative sector through tax and intellectual-property policy.
• Entrepreneurs and artists as collaborators in the city of tomorrow.
• Closing perspectives on participation and collective responsibility.

Studies and proposals

The resource record describes research on intellectual property in digitally native formats, cultural taxation in Europe, and the effects of data and curation algorithms on cultural organisations. These strands reflect the meeting’s wider effort to connect research with proposals for the creative and cultural sectors.

The programme also highlighted cultural start-ups and the role of emerging ventures in widening access to culture, developing new services and testing alternative relationships between technology and creation.

A meeting place for culture and public life

Forum Avignon presents its international meetings as a place where cultural, economic and digital perspectives can meet. This edition remains useful as a historical record of debates about creative work, cultural entrepreneurship, data governance and the contribution of culture to the attractiveness and cohesion of territories.