Consentir à ce qui advient ? Participation artistique, pouvoir d’agir et responsabilité dans les pratiques d’art-en-partage

This article examines the role of consent in participatory, collaborative and citizen-based artistic practices, brought together under the operational term art-en-partage. It argues that attendance at a workshop, an administrative authorisation or an agreement given at the beginning of a project is insufficient to establish meaningful consent, since the uses of a person’s words, image or artistic production may change as the process unfolds. Drawing on two case studies—Archichouette in Argenteuil and the Contrat local d’éducation artistique Terres de France—the analysis identifies several thresholds of consent: entering an artistic proposal, producing a form, sharing it with a group, making it visible and authorising its public circulation. Particular attention is given to projects involving children, whose participation often takes place within educational, cultural or institutional frameworks that have largely been determined in advance. The article also examines asymmetries between artists, institutions, mediators, funders and participants, as well as the position of people who are affected by a project without participating in it directly. Consent is therefore understood as an ongoing process of understanding, negotiation, withdrawal and reformulation. This perspective ultimately shifts evaluation away from visible outcomes alone and towards the concrete conditions of participation: the scope for individual choice, the possibility of refusal, the distribution of responsibilities, the uses made of participants’ contributions and the recognition of disagreement. Consent thus becomes an ethical and methodological criterion through which to assess the reality of sharing and agency within art-en-partage practices.