La promotion des valeurs culturelles de la Grande Région dans le cadre des événements culturels transfrontaliers

We have attempted to show how, through the organisation of a cultural event, identity constructs can be built on a new territorial scale. The case of "Luxembourg, European Capital of Culture" illustrates the issues and constraints, the potentialities but also the limits of cultural territorial construction. Besides the conditions relating to the candidature rules and certain requirements after designation, the successful and less successful initiatives that we found in the programming reveal the complexity of defining and embodying the shared values of the Greater Region.

The cultural event was seized upon as a means of asserting the cultural density of the Luxembourg territory, in order to identify it as a cultural destination, but also to facilitate the cultural inclusion of the populations with the Greater Region space. To do this, there were numerous cross-border projects focused on encouraging the mobility of audiences within the Greater Region in order to generate shared experiences and the recognition of shared values, and finally to increase these populations' feeling of belonging to a common territory, the Greater Region.  However, the common cultural values were diluted and fragmented in the programming. At the same time, in Lorraine, the cultural values selected by consensus among the cultural stakeholders involved were unoriginal and traditional. We note in the way the events were received that the publics overwhelmingly favour local cultural values attached to their region's past – which in the end is quite logical given the orientation of the programming. The "Citadelles de Feu" show, however, was an interesting example of an event fostering an identity construct at Greater Region level, through a re-appropriation of the common industrial past based on notions of heritage and recollection.