Cultural Mediation and Municipal Cultural Workers in Québec

Abstract In Québec (Canada), a growing number of cultural workers and artists are adopting the term “cultural mediation.” The notion has gradually imposed itself on decision makers at the municipal scale and has become one of the preferred intervention approaches by local cultural civil servants. The lack of definition of cultural mediation makes it an ambiguous concept. This uncertainty about its boundaries or its meaning, makes its key promoters, the municipal cultural workers, essential to its existence. Drawing on interviews with cultural workers and artists, this article looks at the role that cultural workers play to make the notion circulate, to instigate new projects and to affect others. In other words, despite their relative invisibility, these administrative workers participate in cultural mediation projects on an unsuspected scale and challenge the “arm’s length” principle generally used in Québec’s cultural domain.