Behind the Scenes with Simon Castets: Rethinking Institutions Across Generations and the Paris Art Scene

Yuval Aluf

LUMA Arles... Photo: Adrian Deweerdt. Courtesy of LUMA Arles.

Paris Art Basel hums with the usual urgency; collectors move from booth to booth as conversations drift between languages. Stickers are quickly changed from green to red under the glass ceiling of the Grand Palais Éphémère. Amid the commotion, I meet Simon Castets in a quiet café nearby, where the pace finally slows enough for reflection. 

After nearly a decade running New York’s Swiss Institute, Castets now works as Director of Strategic Initiatives at LUMA Arles. The contrast between these two worlds—New York and Arles could hardly be greater. “Arles is a small city with a large institution,” he says. “That changes everything.” In New York, attention was the rarest commodity, with galleries and museums competing for a fleeting moment in the spotlight; in Arles, the luxury is time. “Here, visitors have hours, sometimes days, to explore. It changes the entire relationship they can have with art.” Working with over a hundred staff members, Castets speaks of time as a creative resource. “You can accompany artists and audiences over months, even years,” he says. “That’s a privilege very few institutions can offer.” 

For months now, voices across the art world have claimed that Paris—long seen as resting in the shadow of London, New York, and Berlin—is finally waking up again. On this, Castets offers a measured response. “Paris has never ceased to be one of the world’s most art-centric cities,” he later tells me, “but recent geopolitics and global trade movements have made it even more appealing to the visual arts. Major market stakeholders took notice, creating a self-reinforcing loop.” Beyond the fairs and headlines, he points to something more durable: “The core elements are infrastructural—a robust, growing institutional network across France, and an increasing number of artists arriving from abroad.” He hopes this renewed energy will foster “new artist-run spaces and nonprofits,” ensuring that the current momentum leads to lasting change rather than another market cycle. 

Simon Castets... Photo: Courtesy of LUMA Arles

This idea of accompaniment runs throughout Castets’ career. His approach to curation avoids self-assertion. “The curator’s role,” he explains, “is to accompany artists and then step into the background. It’s not about you, it's about creating conditions for others to speak.” 

His long-standing interest in the intersection of art and technology is equally defining. In 2013, alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist, he co-founded 89plus, a research project that explored how a generation raised on the internet reacted through creative practices. “At the time, we were asking how the web might influence art,” he recalls. “But now, it’s everywhere—digital is no longer a category in question; it’s just the world we live in.” The term digital art, he adds, “became obsolete the moment technology entered every aspect of life.” 

That reflection carries into his current work at LUMA. Recent exhibitions, such as “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology”, co-organised by Castets and presented in partnership with the Getty Research Institute, revisit the 1960s collaborations between artists and engineers from Robert Rauschenberg to Billy Klüver and trace how early utopian optimism toward technology shaped creative thought at the time, setting expectations for the future. “Those projects imagined technology as a positive force for humanity,” he notes. “Today, the conversation is more complicated but just as vital.” 

Two years ago, LUMA was invited by Google to collaborate on a new initiative pairing artists Shahryar Nashat, Sara Sadik, and Rachel Rose with engineers to develop commissioned works. “Each side brought something the other lacked,” Castets says. “The artists had the vision, the technologists the access, and LUMA the space and agility to make it happen.” One recent project, led by artist Neil Beloufa with creative studio EBB, invited a class of local high school students to design a miniature amusement park on LUMA’s campus. Over the course of a year of workshops, the students shaped the project from scratch. “When they finally saw it, it was theirs,” Castets recalls. “They weren’t just visitors, they were participants.” 

That spirit of collaboration defines much of what Castets envisions as the “institution of the future.” For him, sustainability encompasses not only ecological aspects but also cultural and ethical considerations. “The future doesn’t arrive once–it comes every day,” he reflects. “Institutions have to keep reinventing themselves. They must remain independent in vision, inclusive in structure, and accountable to their publics.” Museums, he argues, are now expected to model the values that other sectors have abandoned. “It’s sometimes uncomfortable, but absolutely necessary,” he says. “They carry a responsibility to be aware of the systems they’re part of, and play the part they can in addressing their flaws.” 

His perspective on independence reveals a grounded pragmatism. Having worked as both an independent curator and within large institutions, he warns against romanticising autonomy. “Working alone may sound free, but it’s fragile,” he tells me. “Institutions, for all their limits, offer something invaluable: collective intelligence.” He adds, “Working independently teaches resourcefulness, but working within institutions builds continuity. Both matter- one feeds imagination, the other sustains it.” 

When asked how he imagines the art world decades from now, he answers: “I’d like to see artists at the centre of social, political, and industrial conversations, not on the margins. We live in a visual world of ideas,” he says. “Art shouldn’t be treated as decoration; it should be part of the dialogue.” Outside, the fair continues at its relentless pace. Inside the café, Castets’s words linger–a quiet reminder that time itself may be the most radical medium left in the art world. In a landscape obsessed with acceleration, his insistence on slowness feels almost subversive: to make space, to allow things to unfold.