While leading La Criée contemporary art centre in Rennes, France, Larys Frogier quickly understood the importance of developing continuous training about European challenges in its different cultural and relational extensions. He thus enrolled into the Relais Culture Europe agency and their unique training program for conceiving creative and critical cooperation projects as a socially responsible European actor in a global context. He also benefited training from the British Council in London in the framework of their Innovators Club, Cultural Leadership program.

Paying more attention to liminal, crossed and extended areas in the world, Larys Frogier developped multiple intersecting art programs between the cities composing the Atlantic Arc as well as researching on artists from central Europe and post-soviet areas, while weaving also important networks with North and Central Africa, as well as highlighting the importance of learning from the multiple cultures of the Arab world going from the whole Turkey, Persian and Indus cultures to the Arabian Peninsula.
He then implemented various platforms dedicated to transnational art cooperation in an extended Europe such as the long term projects Continental Shores and ACT Art Cooperation Transmission.

Larys Frogier curated various projects including residency programs, exhibitions and publications, among them Algerian Openings and Contemporary Challenges (Kader Attia, Zineb Sedira, Farid Redouani, Samira Sahnoun); African Creations and forms of (post)Colonialism a symposium gathering Lionel Manga, Philippe Mouillon, Yacouba Konaté, Lydie Diakhaté, and the very generous Mantia Diawara who was then working on the movie One World in Relation as a tribute to and a conversation with Edouard Glissant archipelagic thinking, during a boat trip remaking the journey of the African slaves from Europe to the Americas.

From his academic research, Larys Frogier focused on the new concepts of the "figure" in emerging contemporary art, adressing in his curated projects issues related to sexualities, gender diversities, as well as the crisis of representation during the spread of the AIDS epidemic. At that time, he was one the very rare curators in France to program more politically engaged art, particularly related to feminist and transcultural (in)visibilities, oscillating between works that are more conceptual or reflective and others with a strong activist dimension.
In 2001, he invited Elvan Zabunyan to curate a group exhibition featuring African American artists, now considered among the most important of their generation: Renée Green, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O’Grady… Larys Frogier sought to showcase more female artists and highlighted practices that had previously received less attention, such as dance (La Criée then produced several choreographic works, notably by Latifa Laâbissi, Catherine Contour, and Loïc Touzé), photography, and works utilizing archives or text.

Other group exhibitions included Vital Space (Absalon, Joanna Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Martin Ruiz de Azua); Just A Walk conceived by Jocelyn Cottencin and a community of European artists to explore areas going from San Sebastian, Bilbao, Porto, Lisbon and Glasgow; Pipedream with the artist Alexandre Perigot engaging solid partnerships between Berardo Museum (Lisbon), Serralves Foundation (Porto, Tramway (Glasgow), La Criée (Rennes).

Installation views and workshop-residency captations of the art project Just A Walk conceived by Jocelyn Cottencin, 2005-2006.
Partners: Tramway, Glasgow; CCNRB, Rennes; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; RE.AL Lisbon; La Criée centre d’art contemporain, Rennes
Collaborations: Roderick Buchanan, Carla Cruz, Marcel Dinahet, Tiago Guedes, Jean-Marc Huitorel, Alain Michard, Nuno Sacramento, Loïc Touzé, Sébastien Vonier.
Curator: Larys Frogier
Copyrights Jocelyn Cottencin
Courtesy La Criée contemporary art center

For the 2005-2006 cycle of European cooperation project in the Atlantic Arc, Larys Frogier invited Jocelyn Cottencin to create an artistic project on the idea of the circulation between the cities of San Sebastian and Bilbao in Spain, Lisbon and Porto in Portugal and Glasgow in the United Kingdom.
Jocelyn Cottencin’s artistic project starts from the simple idea of being open to elsewhere. To walk at random is to experience unknown paths that may lead to unexpected and rich encounters. It also implies the readiness to leave the habits of movement behind, the rituals of work which can sometimes enclose spaces into too rigid borders.

As a metaphor of circulation and exchange, Just a Walk raises the essential questions of territory, as much in its reality as in the images it generates :
How to cross a territory ? Is a territory made of normative identities or is it a product of the imagination within a flow of fluctuant and contradictory desires ?
And if territory were finally a belief matter, a necessary utopia ?

The desire to circulate generated by the project Just a Walk does not imply a desire to meet the other in order to define an ideal or uniform territory.
Just a Walk is a project where friction, difference and contradiction all have a place.
To provoke meetings and openings is a true personal and political commitment towards and with the other. It is to take the risk of tension and rupture but also that of construction and the possible.