The news fell like a cleaver. On Wednesday December 7, the Ile-de-France region, chaired by Valérie Pécresse (LR), announced that it would suspend its 150,000 euro subsidy to the Ateliers Médicis for 2023. A blow for this artists’ residence, opened in 2018 in Clichy-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis), in order to introduce art – and a little hope – into a suburb that has become the symbol of repeated failures of public policies. To justify its decision, the region invokes the financing by the public establishment of the Les Chichas de la Pensée festival, organized by the controversial Mehdi Meklat.
The former media darling, voice of the excluded Bondy Blog, then columnist on France Inter, saw his meteoric rise shattered after the exhumation, in 2017, of the thousands of anti-Semitic, homophobic and sexist tweets that he had published, from 2011 to 2015, under the pseudonym of Marcelin Deschamps. Mehdi Meklat, born in 1992, pleaded the error of youth, tried to put out the fire by invoking an evil virtual double. In 2018, the young Francilien renews his apologies in a book, Autopsypublished by Grassetand which Laurent Cantet was inspired for his film Arthur Rambo (2021).
Invoking the right to be forgotten and to a second chance, the Ateliers Médicis accepted in 2020 to welcome the young man among their residents. “We had a very clear discussion with Mehdi about his career”confides the management, attached to the “republican and secular values”. Mehdi Meklat and his lifelong sidekick, Badroudine Said Abdallah, then had the task of designing and producing a monthly podcast, Les Chichas de la Pensée. The ambition is to associate young people from Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil (Seine-Saint-Denis) with artists under 30, from working-class neighborhoods.
“Rigour and professionalism”
Convinced by the result, the management decided to continue the adventure by co-producing, up to 20,000 euros per season, in 2020-2021 then in 2022-2023, a festival also called Les Chichas de la Pensée, organized around decolonial issues. . A cultural project which, in the eyes of the establishment, “holds high the values of citizenship and otherness, and participates in the emergence of a new generation of artists”. This free festival, which attracts personalities such as filmmakers Alice Diop et Raoul Peckthe writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr or American videographer Arthur Jafasold out at La Villette, the Théâtre de la Ville or the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers.
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