With Métamorphose(s) at the Rencontres d’Arles, Publicis Luxe reinforces its approach to culture

INfluencia: Publicis Luxe returns for the second year to the Arles photography festival with a new exhibition. What is the genesis of this project which is based on dialogue between artists and creatives?

Christine Milan : Public luxury is the agency that brings together all the talents from strategy to creation, to production for luxury and for a long time the purchase of art and creative people went to Arles to try to find new image talents and stay in touch with social and cultural developments linked to the world of images. And, then last year, we wanted to scare ourselves a little, in any case to have a generous, non-commercial approach and to offer something very different from the campaigns we do for Cartier or Saint Laurent. The idea was to put together a collective exhibition by forming six duos between creatives from the agency and artists.

It’s a dialogue and in some respects of co-creation, these are fertile encounters. The agency’s creatives worked around a theme, time, in particular the relationship between time and creation. The title of the exhibition was “Time is on your side” as a sort of optimistic provocation in the face of an inescapable observation: we are all mortal, we all have 24 hours in the day, so the Time is a kind of great equalizer. These duos worked on different facets of the theme, some on memory, others on the time of scientific research…

The exhibition is multimedia with photography, video, sound installations, painting but also outsider art this year… It is taking place again at the Collaterals which are the former stables of the Hôtel Particulier of Baron de Chartrouse. Arles is a magical setting.

IN: after the theme of time, this year you chose that of metamorphosis?

C.M : each time, I try to tell myself what theme can inspire creative people, because it resonates with the spirit of the times. There are times of great socio-cultural changes, I have the impression that we are going through one, it seemed to me that it was not uninteresting to think about the facets of the transformation. In the same way that last year’s exhibition was an optimistic provocation about time, I wanted this new exhibition to be an optimistic provocation about change, that is to say, we stop telling ourselves that change is something undergone or a degradation but rather something that we direct and which sublimates. The theme of metamorphosis is therefore approached from several prisms through six new duets, Back Track for example attempts to metamorphose memory, painful memories into experimental sounds, Love Serendipity through the juxtaposition of everyday phrases questions human relationships, their feelings and their metamorphoses…

IN: how is this project built within the agency?

C.M : we make a call for projects, I present the theme and its different facets to the collaborators. Then, those who are interested come back with ideas, we collect between 20 and 30 projects. A creative director, the curator of the exhibition who is this year Julien Frydman who was director of the agency Magnum and founded Offscreen (contemporary art fair dedicated to images) and I then select six projects.

IN: what are the challenges for Publicis Luxe of being at the Arles Photographic Meetings?

C. M : there are several issues at different levels. The first challenge is to have a unifying initiative for the agency that allows our creatives to express themselves outside of the campaigns created for our clients. These are creative people who, for many, have a practice outside of their profession. It’s agency culture, pride in creation that we want to promote. The second issue relates to the increasingly porous link between luxury and culture which is a kind of convergence, so it was interesting for us to find a theme which echoes the evolution of luxury as an industry, such as the question of time which constantly arises around issues of timelessness of brands but also of product durability. This year, it is the same with the theme of metamorphosis or even metamorphoses. I have the feeling that the industry is transforming and that in a few years we will perhaps no longer even be talking about the luxury industry but about a large market of ideas or a landscape of creativity where we no longer know very well whether we talks about communication, something commercial or art. A convergence takes place and the borders are more and more blurred between different universes, it is Saint-Laurent who begins to become a film producer in Cannes, Vuitton who collaborates with Yayoi Kusama. Luxury houses are transforming into cultural players. Finally, the third challenge is to create a meeting with our customers that is different from our usual partner relationship to create campaigns and experiences around their products. We invite them the week of the opening to two opening evenings and small dinners where they can meet the artists.

IN: some luxury houses are already very involved in the world of culture…

C.M : yes, indeed, in art, cinema… Like Balenciaga who had co-produced an episode of Simpson few years ago. But I imagine a future where luxury houses would firstly be cultural players who, it turns out, still sell bags and shoes. Today, they create experiences alongside their products such as fashion shows which have become shows and content.

IN: an advertising agency that exhibits in a photography festival, that may come as a surprise…

C.M : we have always been very close to the world of photography, we have worked with Peter Lindberg for campaigns Lancome, Mario Sorrenti…all the big names in photography advertise. We could have done a retrospective of our most beautiful campaign images, that would have been valuable but we wanted to challenge ourselves and explore other media while presenting works around photography which remains the heart of the Arles meetings.

IN : lAdvertising and art meet but they remain very distinct universes…

C.M : I have a fairly strong conviction from this point of view, which is that both worlds have always been very close and at the same time they must remain separate. Many artists, whether in cinema, directors, designers or photographers, have started or done advertising for a while. There has always been a sharing of talents between these two worlds. In a way, advertising can be a patron of art because it allows people to continue their profession. At the same time, I think we must maintain a distinction between the two, advertising having the objective of selling something while art does not. It’s very important that it stays different.

IN: what system do you use to communicate about your exhibition?

C.M : we do not set up a particular communication system. Last year, we made one or two announcements in the specialized press, we mainly try to relay the information in the press. We were deliberately discreet last year because my great fear was to hear “the pubards are coming to Arles”. We wanted to go there with humility the first year, we were very well received, the criticism was good, we had a quality exhibition which was not perceived as advertising. I think we passed the entrance test! This year, we want to be more visible.

IN: Is your approach linked to the online art platform YourArt launched by Maurice Lévy (chairman of the supervisory board of Publicis) last year?

C.M : we started this project before the platform was launched YourArt, in any case we didn’t know that we were working on this same theme. But these two initiatives are completely separate. Maurice Lévy came to the expo last year, he was very happy. Our first exhibition was mounted under the name Publicis luxe but this year we wanted to create an entity to host all our art and culture initiatives, this is the platform Cultish that we are launching on the occasion of Arles. Cultish has a logo and a visual identity that will be on all communication elements. It will be able to develop many projects, including with YourArt, like setting up an exhibition for a client. Currently, we are discussing creating a magazine or publication this fall to extend the theme of metamorphoses beyond the exhibition.

IN: Could Cultish be like a cultural agency?

C.M : yes, that’s a bit like that, we see it, agencies interested in luxury and culture are developing offers in this sense, it’s our way of doing it. The idea is to host projects but also to give a space for expression and visibility to artists through our exhibitions for example. It’s a dialogue and an exchange between us. We are very happy to be able to work with them, to benefit from their talent and their creativity and at the same time we are putting together an exhibition, we are producing, we are designing where they can show their works. There are bridges that can be created beyond the event. Last year, for example, a client fell in love with an artist and asked him for a project.