Project in preparation
Fair creative cooperation
DELTA
Living craft traditions supporting fair and sustainable creative innovation through cooperation between Europe and Southeast Asia.
Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries Innovation Centre
Craft, music and cultural practice carry knowledge through people, materials and places. This centre explores how that knowledge can be transmitted, adapted and used in contemporary life while respecting those who sustain it.
Our agenda brings cultural practitioners into the design of research. It connects the study of skills and sources with practical experimentation, responsible digital tools, and the conditions that allow creative activity to remain viable.
Two columns, and the difference between them matters. Established means an activity carried on here now. In research means a line of enquiry we are developing, which is not the same as a track record.
| Sector | Standing | What that means at Mas-Grenier |
|---|---|---|
| Artistic crafts | Established | Textile and material practice in the workshops. |
| Intangible cultural heritage | Established | Sung chant as a living practice, taught and transmitted. |
| Tangible cultural heritage | Established | An eighteenth-century monastic complex in continuous use and care. |
| Archives and libraries | Established | The estate’s archive and scholarly digital library of the Congrégation de Saint-Maur. |
| Music | Established | Chant taught as practice. |
| Architecture | Established | The estate works with architects on low-cost repair strategies for heritage buildings. |
| Performing arts | In research | Integrating artificial intelligence methods to generate cost savings in the performing arts. |
| The arts · audiovisual · design · fashion · festivals · literature · books and publishing · radio · visual arts · advertising | In research | Artificial intelligence methods for business-process improvement, across the creative industries that would use them. |
The research question behind the two In research rows is one question, not ten: where in a creative working process does an artificial-intelligence method reduce cost or effort without displacing the judgement that gives the work its value, and what does it cost to run once the pilot ends? The sectors are listed separately because the answer differs between them — scheduling a festival and clearing a publisher’s rights are not the same problem — but the way of asking is shared.
The Abbey supports artists, creators and artistic craftspeople skilled in the traditional trades related to cultural heritage restoration.
Research strands
Four lines of enquiry, each with the goals it pursues and the work it has under way.
How does practical knowledge move between experienced practitioners and learners? What is lost when a practice is documented but not taught? How do repeated practice, language and place shape what is actually learned?
Chant, textile practice, foodcraft and conservation each offer a distinct case study, and they share a property that makes them hard to study: the knowledge is in the hands and the ear before it is in the record.
This strand sets out to safeguard and transmit intangible cultural heritage as a living practice; to examine and improve how craft knowledge actually passes from an experienced practitioner to a learner; to map and record techniques and materials at risk of being lost, without letting the record become a substitute for the teaching; and to recover chant from its manuscript sources so that it can be sung again rather than only catalogued.
We study repair, reuse, adaptation and remaking through the actual material and design decisions involved, comparing options for skill, quality, durability, resource use, cost and demand. A repaired object is not automatically the environmentally preferable one; that conclusion needs a defined comparison, and producing defensible comparisons is part of the work.
The framing here is unusually close to what a monastic estate does by necessity. Craft practice is a standing example of frugal innovation — using local resources efficiently, minimising waste, drawing on traditional knowledge systems rooted in generations of place-based practice.
The goals here are to develop crafts-led circular innovation; to evaluate the adaptive reuse of built cultural heritage against defensible comparisons rather than assumptions; to treat food heritage and gastronomic innovation as a subject of study in its own right; and to test circular design and regenerative production in a place where materials, buildings and table are already connected.
How can documentation, transcription, translation, retrieval or design tools assist professional work while keeping source provenance, permissions and human judgement visible? The measure that interests us is total operating burden, including review and correction time, not automated speed alone.
We study how digital tools affect work, authorship, rights and the costs of review. The value of a tool depends on its suitability for a defined task and the evidence gathered in use.
Our aims here are to integrate artificial intelligence into cultural work practice with source provenance, permissions and human review kept visible; to establish what a fair and transparent market for cultural content looks like in an era of generative systems; and to contribute to interoperability, to conservation and digital restoration, and to collaborative platforms through which institutions co-create rather than merely publish.
What services and products are genuinely viable? How are knowledge holders compensated, and how are benefits shared? What continues after a project ends?
International cooperation raises a question we want to answer carefully rather than assert: what can transfer between contexts, and what must remain under local control.
Our research examines how cultural and creative activity connects with the social economy, including cooperation among businesses, associations and cooperatives. The further goals of this strand are to help consolidate a working culture and creativity innovation ecosystem; to develop approaches to cultural tourism that a small place can sustain; and to build creative alliances and international partnerships on terms that leave cultural authority where it belongs.
Proposed methods include practitioner interviews, observation of work, annotated source-to-practice records, co-design sessions, comparative workflow trials, material and lifecycle assessment with specialists, and follow-up on whether an approach was adopted.
Outputs could include validated learning formats, documented workflows, material case studies, rights-aware digital resources and tested service models.
Workrooms, spaces for residential collaboration, and access to cultural and documentary resources by agreement. Equipment and technical capabilities are listed individually on the infrastructure page.
Project in preparation
DELTA
Living craft traditions supporting fair and sustainable creative innovation through cooperation between Europe and Southeast Asia.
Project in preparation
RETHREAD STUDIO
A design-led approach to the next use of existing garments, bringing wearers, makers and repairers into the creative process.
Associated initiative
ATELIER · Conservatoire du Patrimoine des Abbayes
Practical ways for cultural organisations to use AI within professional workflows, with permissions and human review kept visible.
We are interested in hearing from research teams, cultural practitioners, museums, craft organisations and enterprises working on transmission, repair, authorship, or the economics of creative practice.