Topics Café 2025-2026

This year, students in the E3C – Events, Culture, Communication & Creativity major of the Grande École Program designed a new season of Topics Café by ISTEC, themed around “Upside-Down Meaning.” Through three public events, they offered a sensitive, cultural, and creative analysis of the transformations of our time. A look back at a season that explored the interplay between body, technology, sensory experience, and new cultural practices.

1st edition — October 16: Launch of the “Upside-Down” theme

The season kicked off with an immersive evening dedicated to exploring emerging cultural phenomena and evolving professions, centered around two thought-provoking questions:

• Do you know what Shrekking is?
• Have you ever needed an intimacy coordinator?

?

In a friendly atmosphere, students explored practices that challenge our perceptions: Shrekking, a form of expression somewhere between performance and self-deprecation, and the crucial role of the intimacy coordinator on set, reflecting a new awareness of the body, respect, and consent.

This first meeting laid the groundwork for a season designed to overturn perceptions and play with our senses… often in unexpected ways.

2nd edition — November 6: “When the virtual consoles the real.”

For this second meeting, Topics Café delved into the paradoxes of the digital world through three key trends:

• The Invisible Health Code: when health becomes an implicit social standard.
• Doomscrolling: the fascinating need to consume the worst in order to paradoxically feel better.
• The Virtual Has a Smell: exploration sensory experience of technology, beyond the visual.

Three speakers provided additional insights:

• Alain Toledano, professor and president of the Rafael Institute;
• Dario Savary, expert in digital journalism;
• Clothilde Dubernet, founder of OLFY.

An edition rich in deliberate contradictions, where the virtual world has emerged not simply as an escape, but as an emotional palliative… sometimes more more real than reality.

3rd edition — November 27: “Everyone with their bodies exposed.”

To conclude this first cycle, Topics Café explored the writings of the body around the theme:
“When skin becomes language, appearance becomes matter.”

In a society where our bodies:

• expose themselves,
• transform themselves,
• assert themselves,
• and constantly tell their own stories,

This edition explored how appearance becomes a social text, a field of expression, a space of both intimate and collective tensions. A powerful, unfiltered evening that sparked discussion on the contemporary relationship with the body: a mirror of freedoms, but also of injunctions, obsessions, and the quest for identity.

An E3C Season: Creativity, Expertise, and Collective Intelligence

Through these three editions, the students of the Master’s program in Event Management, Culture, Communication & Creativity has created a true laboratory of ideas.
Each meeting has been a learning experience:

• Event design and production
• Analysis of socio-cultural trends
• Public speaking
• Creative mediation
• Professional networking

The Topics Café continues to establish itself as a space where ISTEC brings together innovation, culture, and critical thinking, always with a touch of conviviality.