House of Culture and Campus Life

Activities

The Maison de la Culture et de la Vie de Campus aims to contribute to cultural and university life by disseminating knowledge and information and by organising artistic and cultural events.

It has been operating since the 1995/1996 academic year. The law of 26 January 1984 clearly defines the cultural mission of higher education institutions. Moreover, since 14 January 2002, a five-year cooperation protocol has been signed between the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research and the Ministry of Culture and Communication.

The priorities are:

• dissemination of knowledge
• the production of student and staff achievements
• the organisation of artistic and cultural events

These guidelines are based on the need to encourage the development of students' amateur practices and their active participation in defining the institution's cultural policy.

Although it has fostered the emergence of many cultural events, it can still establish and develop its orientations.

One of the five priority areas for the university set by the government is the living conditions of students (JO n°185 11 August 2007). The promotion of culture has its place alongside sport and community life.

Today, the Maison de la Culture et de la Vie de Campus (House of Culture and Campus Life) organises the monitoring of all the cultural activities of the University, which has become one of the leading cultural and scientific players in the region. The actions and values that we must continue to carry out together have a double aim: on the one hand, culture as a binding and identity-building factor for our community and, on the other hand, recognition in its local and international territory.

The department also assists student associations in the implementation of their projects, ensures the administrative management of the CVEC and FSDIE commissions and coordinates the various forms of aid offered to students.

In this logic, since 2007, the University of Avignon has joined the A+U+C network (Art+University+Culture) and R2VE (Network of Student Life Managers in Higher Education).

Organization

Director of Culture: Myriam DOUGADOS
Deputy Director : Alexandra PIAUMIER
Administrative manager, in charge of the CVEC and FSDIE commissions: Sylvia DARRICAU
Secretariat: Baia PONTIER and Karinne MORIN
Psychologists: Jean-François PEREZ and Estelle DOERFLINGER

Further information

In July 2005, the Maison Jean Vilar organised an exhibition entitled Avignon, un rêve que nous faisons tous. In this title, the reference to what Jean Vilar called the community of spectators is explicit. He also said that he wanted to see the spectator become a "participant". By adding to this title "all together", a formula familiar from university demonstrations and social movements, the reference is double: the community of spectators and the university community.

• Culture and its forms are said to have the capacity to transform an individual into a spectator, to make him or her exist within an audience and sometimes to transform the people gathered from the audience into a community gathered around a work. The cultural experience then becomes collective in the full sense of the word.
   
• The university is composed of three bodies designated as teachers-researchers, administrators and students. The latter are administratively referred to as users, and some refer to them as the university's public. More globally, these three bodies are supposed to constitute the university community sharing common debates and values: a culture. The question of university autonomy raises the question of culture at the level of an institution, of what its different bodies can form a community around. It is a question of asking how, by transforming its members from users or the public into participants, culture, through a chain of cooperation, can transform certain moments and experiences into collective work.

However, it is not a question here of evacuating the artistic question and what some call education in it, others training of the public, but above all, it will be necessary to think of the tension between the world of art and that of knowledge in their reciprocal proximity and defiance. It is necessary not to fall into the trap of false evidence that knowledge and art go hand in hand, that the artist and the academic are naturally conniving. The very notion of culture, through its capacity to describe both art and knowledge, questions their relationship.