5 questions to the curator François Gautret

How did hip-hop, this movement born in the black New York ghettos, take root in France in the 1980s? How was it adopted so well here that it is now dominant among the millennial generation?

With this playful and very well documented exhibition, the curator François Gautret especially wanted to show the abundance and the great diversity of this multidisciplinary culture, but also the mediums with which it maintains a fruitful dialogue, whether it is about cinema, radio, fashion or photo.

What is your personal relationship with hip-hop?
Francois Gautret : I grew up in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, close to the pioneers, in Stalingrad. My next door neighbor was called DJ Abdel, and Dee Nasty lived in the tower next door. I didn’t discover hip-hop at one point, I was born into this culture. My brother, who is nine years older than me, listened to music, the graffiti buddies from the BBC (the Bad Boy Crew pioneers) came over to the house, so I was immersed in this universe all the time. Being rather reserved by nature, I was not the master of the microphone but I needed to express myself and I found my way very young: I entered the dance, in the station wagon, at the age of 9 years. In parallel with my studies, I joined the Quintessence dance company in 1996 and a little later I accompanied the collective of DJ Double H crew – every time Cut Killer, DJ Abdel or Pone did a concert, they gave us were calling to dance. I set up my own company in 1999, RStyle, with which I have been organizing all kinds of events around hip-hop in the broad sense for 22 years, such as the Urban Film Festival. By force of circumstances, I became an archivist of filmed content and RStyle became a resource center, with people asking me to watch this or that film that we couldn’t find on the internet. One of the difficulties encountered in the making of the exhibition was precisely to find the archives of rap clips in HD. It’s very complicated, even music channels like MTV have thrown a lot of video masters. The archives gradually disappear, and with them the heritage of hip-hop.

Precisely, what was the most difficult to find and that you are particularly happy to present?
I am particularly proud to have found the poster for the New York City Rap Tour. This concert is the arrival of hip-hop in France with the Americans who landed 40 years ago at the Hippodrome de Pantin, that is to say almost at the very place of the Philharmonie! This poster was particularly difficult to find because even Bernard Zekri who organized the tour at the time, did not have it and did not know where to find it. We finally got our hands on the original in New York, in the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx. They loaned it to us and we brought it in especially for the occasion. To accompany him to the exhibition, we’re showing a super rare video clip from the New York City Rap Tour. There is the excerpt from Megahertz where we see them express themselves at the Bataclan with DST, Fab 5 Freddy, Rammellzee, the Rock Steady, and another small film, Rap, by Pascal Venturini. We have done a real groundwork to find content on this founding event that many have heard about without really knowing the details.

What was the most difficult in achieving this course?
What was the most difficult, I believe, was to present the archival content in an original and interactive way. The scenography produced by Clémence Farrell is sublime, with the corrugated iron, a reference to iron curtains, to the street, but in a rather hushed way. The idea was really to give a strong dimension to things like the famous wasteland of the Chapel where it all began. The audiovisual teams have also done a great job on the idea of ​​360: we will therefore be surrounded by archive images but augmented by spatialized sounds. When we are at the La Chapelle waveground, we see the aerial metro passing on the right in video but we also hear it on the right, and then we have the graffiti artists who paint on the left and we hear them on the left, so that it is truly an experience for the visitor. I wanted to get away from the somewhat dusty museum and bring an event-driven, lively, fun part, with continuous programming in the exhibition spaces, performances, battles. Seeing my little sketches come true today is a culmination. The 360 ​​° audiovisual space was a dream, and it is therefore a joy to experience it.

Does hip-hop still need to be explained and legitimized in 2022?
I think it remains misunderstood even though it is everywhere today. Hip-hop remains frowned upon. The movement has always had to fight for everything. As a dancer, if only to have access to a dance hall, I often had to say that I was doing contemporary dance. With the exhibition, I especially wanted to show the diversity of the movement. Because we still tend to confuse hip-hop with rap, or with dance, which are only part of the whole. I also wanted to interest all generations. This culture endures because each generation reappropriates it, injects it with its musicality, its influences, the origin and the experience of its actors. But as everyone appropriates it, we find everything and its opposite in this culture, which is only paradoxes: we can have the Zulu Nation movement which advocates peace and unity, but we can also have the gangstarap movement. . We can have the mainstream and the underground. You can have graffiti vandals and artists in galleries. We can have hardcore rap and poetic rap. From breaks to the Olympic Games and from breaks to battles or to Chaillot. We can be in the art of smart clothing, but we can do collabs’ with luxury houses. Opposites do not cancel each other out, they respond to each other.

Beyond the advisers you surrounded yourself with (author Vincent Piolet, journalist Yérim Sar and director Franck Haderer), did you feel supported by the French hip-hop community?
If I want to be really honest, not everyone really believed it. It was not always easy to mobilize the actors of the movement. Some had reservations, such as: “The Philharmonic is the State, they have never supported us, why are we going to give them strength now? Etc”. Yes, ok, I understand, but at the same time it is also an opportunity to set foot in the door and why not to develop things. I think everyone has their hip-hop, their interpretation, everyone has their own experience and it was really important for me to bring together. I feel a bit like a mediator. People who have not seen each other for a long time will meet at the exhibition, it is an opportunity to cross disciplines too, breakers, rappers, graffiti artists, because in the end they rarely have the opportunity to meet. find all together. The idea of ​​360 was to be on these major disciplines of hip-hop but also to show everything there is around: radio, cinema, photography, graphics, fashion. Hip-hop feeds on a lot of things and I certainly didn’t want to compartmentalize it again. It was important to convey that and make it visible to the public who may tend to lock it in clichés. Hip-hop is not one-dimensional, there is something for everyone. This is what we must be aware of.

“Hip-Hop 360” exhibition
To see at the Philharmonie de Paris from December 17, 2021 to July 24, 2022
Every day except Monday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Fridays until 10 p.m.
(the exhibition is closed on December 25 and January 1)
Prices : Free for children under 16, from € 7 to € 12 for others
Concerts, choreographies, conferences and breakdance battles are planned alongside the exhibition from January 2022, consult the program