Intermediate cultural places : a specific collective identity ?[Les lieux culturels intermédiaires : une identité collective spécifque ?]

The term usually used in France to name intermediate places covers a multiplicity of project-spaces with a strong artistic dimension, initiated by actors of civil society pursuing primary goals other than profit-making, without necessarily being considered as cultural institutions. Their essential place – although it is still insufficiently recognized in cultural development – calls for a more precise identification of what they are. The purpose of the present study based on a set of intermediate places is to specify what both brings together and differentiates these project-spaces from the currently highly valued third-places dynamics. The body of this work consists of some two hundred websites of cultural places that signed the charter of the National Coordination of Intermediate and Independent Places. The study shows two types of results. The first one makes it possible to clarify the specific morphology of this set of places, that are nevertheless crossed by significant differences in the way each one has to present, qualify and decline their project, its stakes and the way to achieve them. These differences are partly due to the way in which these experiences were initiated (by a few people, by an already existing organization, by a collective of actors, etc.) and by the cultural approach that has been privileged (live performance and/or visual arts, artistic and/or social dimensions, etc.). The second type of results enables us to sketch out a kind of common identity matrix for these places, each of which remains singular nonetheless. The importance of the artistic issue and the aesthetic question that underlies it, as well as the question of the relations with the populations of the nearby territory, thus largely order the collective identity of these places. In this way, the image of organizations participating in the evolutions of the place of the art in our societies is strengthened, as well as in the development of entrepreneurial forms first structured around the dimensions of sensitivity, meaning and cooperation.