The Île-de-France region has suspended funding for the Ateliers Médicis because of their support for Mehdi Meklat, author of controversial remarks in 2017.
SourceAFP
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Lhe Île-de-France region, chaired by Valérie Pécresse, suspends its funding for 2023 at the Ateliers Médicis, a cultural space located in Seine-Saint-Denis which hosts the author Mehdi Meklat, whose controversial tweets had sparked controversy. in 2017. During its board meeting on Tuesday, the establishment’s management offered “for the third consecutive year to support a project led by Mehdi Meklat, who, as a reminder, has in the past made anti-Semitic, misogynistic and homophobic remarks on Twitter, ”lamented the region on Wednesday December 7 in a press release.
The right-led region, which “has repeatedly expressed […] of his disapproval”, “regrets” that the management of the establishment “stubbornly” since 2021 “to support a person who has made such unacceptable remarks”. “These programming choices go completely against the values of the Republic”, further believes the region, which told Agence France-Presse to suspend its annual subsidy of 150,000 euros for 2023.
The region also emphasizes having paid 900,000 euros for the construction of the temporary building, in Clichy-Montfermeil, and having provided 5 million for the construction of the final building, within the framework of the State-region plan contract (CPER). “Everything is suspended”, assured the entourage of Valérie Pécresse to Agence France-Presse.
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“Les Chicas de la Pensée”, Mehdi Meklat’s festival, “holds high the values of citizenship and otherness”, reacted the Ateliers Médicis in a written response to Agence France-Presse, stressing that the project had ” already won over a number of cultural establishments and brought together more than 7,000 people”. The establishment says it is “at the disposal of the Region”, of which it shares “fundamentally the republican values”, to “exchange and share the reasons” which led it to support the project.
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Opened in 2018, the “Villa Médicis” in the suburbs is intended to be the prefiguration of a great laboratory of artistic creation with the move into a future place which must be built by 2025. In 2005, the center of serious urban violence, the deprived and landlocked towns of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil, located about twenty kilometers from Paris, were chosen in 2008 by the State to set up this artists’ residence there, on the model of the chic Académie de France in Rome from which it takes its name.
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Contacted by Agence France-Presse, Mehdi Meklat did not wish to react. In 2017, then a young columnist for France Inter, he had to step back after his thousands of anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist and misogynistic messages had come up, published under a pseudonym between 2010 and 2017. Mehdi Meklat then apologized, renewed in a book, Autopsy. His story inspired the film Arthur Rambo by Laurent Cantet, released in 2021.