3 International art festivals in Bordeaux, Soulac and Royan, France working with experimental artists and formats. These festivals were curated by Jared Gradinger working with his artistic community in Berlin and elsewhere. Over 200 artists participated in the festivals over the course of 3 years. Partners included CAPC Bordeaux, Base Sous Marin, TinBox Art gallery, Gallery Cortex Athletic, Le Marie

In Bordeaux, the Grandes Traversées continue to reinvent themselves and seek new ways of sharing the artistic experience. Through the personality of New York performer Jared Gradinger, it is the city of Berlin that invests, for two days, three venues in the Gironde city, inviting us to end the year with a joyfully undisciplined crossing of appearances.

Emblematic of this mutation is the personality of Jared Gradinger, "MC" of this edition, and through him the city of Berlin, where this New York performer has taken up residence like many artists from all over the world, and where most of the artistic proposals of this 2009 edition come from. Cosmopolitan and polyglot, the artistic community that is in the process of forming and developing a new form of artistic exchange, perhaps a more "equitable" one, has in fact allowed the proliferation of a new form of Esperanto, which is reflected in the title of this edition: "How do you are? "In this question (once addressed to Gradinger by an Argentinean artist friend), clumsiness and grammatical incorrectness are instantly adorned with poetic, not to say metaphysical virtues: through it, Gradinger says he wants to invite spectators and artists to "dare to communicate, [not to] be afraid of being misunderstood through gestures, words, concepts, images, colours and sounds. »

For the Esperanto that is prevalent in the German capital is also an artistic Esperanto: neither an amphigouri nor a "lowest common denominator", rather an open way of approaching the multiplicity of artistic languages and aesthetic registers. Coming from all geographical horizons and all fields of artistic creation, the artists who meet there also have in common a "desire" and a "need to be heard" and, consequently (also because of the financial precariousness in which they generally work), an uncomplicated way of approaching creation, as much as their status as creators. It is with a kind of new naivety that they appropriate the technical means (of unprecedented richness) now available to them, and that they do not hesitate to board up "disciplines" other than their own, by playing with taxonomies. All the artists invited to take the helm of these Grandes Traversées are a little like Jared Gradinger's personality: "a dancer who never learned the profession; a choreographer who has shown very few pieces; a man of the theatre who no longer does any", as Eric Bernard says, but above all someone who "excels in everything he does; both in the aesthetic field and in his ability to be at the centre of an active community in perpetual movement". An attitude that brings to mind the Geniale Dilettante, the "brilliant dilettantes", this movement born in post-punk West Berlin under the aegis of the industrial music group Einstürzende Neubauten, united by the same spontaneous and shared, empirical and performative conception of art (with a small "a"): Berlin definitely seems to be the homeland of exploratory artists, of artistic movements where what counts is not so much art as the movement (the one that leads to it, the one it provokes). And this is what the Grandes Traversées seem to seek above all in their guests (whether actors or spectators): this way of considering disciplines as "toolboxes", modular and mobile devices that can be shared at leisure; this curiosity that expresses above all a desire to communicate.

It is difficult to isolate a proposal or a personality among the forty-something people on the menu of "How do you are ? "spread over two evenings (one devoted to dance, the other to music) in the magnificent setting of the Bordeaux submarine base, and over a long day - at the CAPC and at the excellent Cortex Athletico gallery on 31 December - during which there will be a succession of performances, workshops, meetings, exhibitions and a "doll making workshop". We can choose to rely on some titles - A short history of Argentinean punk (by and for Tatiana Saphir), Edgar (by and for Grayson Millwood and Serpa Soares - photo), the Roadkill of the Australians from Splintergroup - or some names : the German choreographer Angela Schubot, the Japanese detonators Tenko or Hanayo (at the Cortex Athletico gallery), or the Germans Transformer Di Roboter, a duo of musicians apostles of digital chaos, whose stage performances would make Pan Sonic's look like a lounge evening. One might as well prefer to stroll and stroll as one pleases, relying above all on his spirit of adventure and his exploratory spirit: for these are the very spirit and meaning of the Grandes Traverses - a certain collective spirit, and a certain sense of disorientation.