Jazz in Marciac, which this year celebrates its 45e anniversary, has just lowered the curtain, Sunday August 6 in the Gers, after eighteen days and nights of musical festivities. At about twenty kilometers as the crow flies, the 11e Festival d’Artagnan de Lupiac will offer the public its historical events on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 August. With 268,000 visitors in 2022 for the first, and 2,600 expected for the second in 2023, the two Gascon festivals do not play in the same category.
However, they share one thing in common: the desire to rely on culture to resist desertification. A territory development project confirmed for Marciac, 1,300 inhabitants, and a future project for Lupiac, 300 souls. However, in these villages, the same question arises: how to trigger a virtuous circle of development without losing its soul?
If the east of the Gers, close to the Toulouse metropolis, benefits from a strong economic attractiveness, this is not the case for the western territories, “isolated, relegated, landlocked”, notes Jean-Louis Guilhaumon, mayor of Marciac. In this context, Jazz in Marciac (JIM) has become an emblematic event through its programming qualities and its atmosphere. It is the flagship of an entire local, even regional, economy.
“We are sitting on a nugget”
For JIM, which works with a budget of more than 5 million euros, at the beginning, “The question was: how not to die? Answer: by practicing cultural reinvestment”, summarizes Mr. Guilhaumon, its president and co-founder. In 1991, the interactive museum Les Territoires du jazz opened its doors; twenty years later, L’Astrada was inaugurated: a hall with five hundred seats, which had become a public establishment for cultural cooperation.
In the same movement, the municipality renovates the Gascon bastide and ensures the safeguard of the college, thanks to the creation of jazz classes in 1993. The JIM festival can count on its thousand volunteers as well as on public support (region, department, etc.) or private. Even if state aid is not “not up to par”according to Jean-Louis Guilhaumon, “Mariac the creative” teeming with initiatives. “ We have lost none of our values, and we are in control of the project, because our strength is our ability to adapt. JIM certainly employs six full-time people, but these are skills recruited on the territory »he insists.
At Lupiac, we do not hide the fact that if Marciac is a model, it is not necessarily possible to reproduce it. “ We are sitting on a nugget”, nevertheless considers a committed partner. Indeed, Lupiac is the birthplace, at Castelmore castle, of Charles de Batz, the real d’Artagnan. However, for more than three hundred years, he was not always a prophet in Gascon country, or even in Lupiac.
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