Festival du mot (event)

An event based on the written and spoken word / Workshops funded by the Foundation, with performances at the Charité-sur-Loire festival (May 2010)

Founded in 2005 based on an idea by Marc Lecarpentier, former director of the cultural magazine programme Télérama, and the municipality of La Charité-sur-Loire, in Burgundy, the Festival du mot is an event promoting the written and spoken word in all its diverse artistic forms (shows, exhibitions, workshops, readings and concerts). This cultural event enables the town situated deep in the countryside to attract new visitors and break down barriers, using original projects to bring together young students and pensioners, secondary school students and the disabled, youth centres and educational institutions. Each year, the whole town mobilises for this event, which is chaired by the linguist Alain Rey.

In 2010, the Fondation Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, in collaboration with the association Mot-et-MOTS, which manages the festivities, funded three workshops for primary and junior secondary school students, once again based on the idea of workshops bringing people together around art: Roald Dahl in pictures, in which artist painter Géraldine Lavillaugouet invited three primary school classes from Pouilly-sur-Loire to illustrate the colourful and surreal world of the famous children’s writer; The tree that hides the forest, where final year pupils from the École des Remparts and the  Édouard Mouron medical educational centre were invited to walk through their “own” word forest, in an activity blending theatre and plastic arts. During a poetic stroll, the participants listened to or read stories by Lewis Caroll or Jean Pierre Siméon, whispered through the branches or stuck to trees; and Words of yesterday and today in which the writer Xavier Georgin led two writing workshops, the first on “words of yesterday” with a group of residents from the Henri Dunant centre and the second on “words of today” with adolescents from the La Pépinière youth centre. Based on themes such as food, jobs, love or swearwords, they drew up lists of words and then defined them using their own stories and memories.