“Inter-météores”... What is this all about? A new supermarket? A meeting about Alsacian beer? A swingers club for astronomy’s fetishists? The wacky name of a contemporary art piece?... Not at all! Inter-météores is a creative international cooperation project between the Master DPACI’s students from the University Lumière Lyon 2, and the METEOR Festival in Norway.

The idea was born of a collective desire to encounter reality. To interact with other European actors and discover their cultures through another medium than the internet. To go out from this Franco-French theoretical cocoon in order to see with our own eyes - or even better, to touch with our own hands - what is done outside of our universities, outside of our own country. To interchange roles, instead of being audience, becoming co-organisers for a short interval.

Seven of us gathered around our common interest for art, culture and travel. Ready to flout the law, determined to interpose ourselves in the interstices of the foreign cultural environments, we worked at the creation of a partnership and the production of a concrete project… and let’s be frank about it… interplanetary!

Thanks to Bergen’s Meteor Festival managers, in particular our ‘interfaces’ Sven Birkeland, Karoline Skuseth, Ingrid Ellestad and Maja Bergebakken Sundt, we had the chance to intervene in Norway, within the festival program itself - organized by the BIT Teatergarasjen as a biennial.

Why the Meteor festival? International and interdisciplinary, it proposes an eclectic program whether from the point of view of the artistic forms or the point of view of the diversity of participating countries. The festival offers not only live performances and shows, but also a discursive time dedicated to workshops, seminars, panel discussions, conferences, debates, to which we were able to participate, in a way a little bit radical! …and that’s putting it mildly, because the theme of Meteor Festival 2019 was: “ Radical Failure”.

At this point, as part of the panel “Radical Future Groups” with the students from the University of Bergen, we had a theme, a place and a given time to let our imagination free and create an event from scratch, as we please! After some interminable research around failure, trying to dissect it, decorticate it, interrogate it, we arrived to an intersection point where all our desires were converging: working on the concept of happy failure.

All in all, doesn’t failure come with virtues? Isn’t it a necessity?... The mistake carries the potential of a change in itself, of a renewal, of a new opportunity. To fail is to risk, to venture, to dare, to challenge, to interfere. The failure is a chance to reinvent ourselves, to innovate, to evolve, to improve, to perfect, to transform, to undertake over and over again! Ultimately, isn’t failure a social construction?... Interesting, but interstellar! Our project was built around this cosmic and blurry notion.

It was a rough task. It was not only about putting together an interactive exhibition, an intergenerational workshop and an intergalactic DJ battle. We also had to manage the editing of a guide, organize a restitution in France, establish a budget, deal with five grant applications, defend the project in front of several juries, embark on a crowdfunding campaign, follow a predicted timetable, create communication media and visual material, intercept testimonies, prepare many activities, get away with the administration, logistics (transport, accommodation), technical problems, collaborate with the Meteor team, and most of it remotely, in English, in addition to our respective lives…

Inter-météores… An experience as brief as an interlude but that rings inside us as strong as ever! Thanks to this project we could interpellate the most curious ones, interrupt them in their path to success and offer them an inter-cultural interlude.

Violette, Maëlle, Virginie, Ludan, Anaëlle, Théo et Lucie - a bunch of crazy to intern