INTERMEDIA , TRIBUTE TO DICK HIGGINS   Nowadays, no one would contest the poets' founding and initiating role concerning the elaboration of the great artistic movements. Visual poems have been seen before the year 2 000 AD, and these pieces went through great expansion periods at different times: in the hellenic Greece, Latin littérature, in the Renaissance and the Baroque. Dick Higgins pointed more than 2 000 visual poems since antiquity until the late 19th century. Baudelaire linked poetry and art and converted the poet into an artist, Rimbaud connected art to life, and Mallarmé remodeled the poem into a typographical ballet or into a score-poem. At the beginning of the century poets created the "avant-garde" movements : the Futurism by Marinetti, Dada by Tzara and Hausmann and many more, and Cobra by Dotremont. From 1965, Dick Higgins uses the Intermedia concept as revealing to establish the existence of intermedia art works " with this notion, there is a conceptual fusion and you can't really separate out the different media in an integral way "; intermedia concept which is still claimed by most of the current artists. This exhibition, full of testimonies, derision, anecdotes, texts, photos, collages, scores, unusual encounters, digital pictures - a wink to new technologies- , and films is an homage to Dick Higgins, who left us suddenly during the night of the 25th to the 26th of October 1998. His henceforth famous words "I'm having a hard time to quote by name works of art that have been deliberately standing somewhere in between painting and shoes" and photos and videos taken stay in our days as a testimony of his expressive presence and of his commitment in these intermedia technics that he has put into concept more than 30 years ago. The 60 artists present in the show knew Dick very well, new generations appreciate him, and all of them restore this state of mind, therefore opening new lands, only those of art. Sylvie Ferré, curator.