Raisons d’Agir Festival: When Collage Gives Voice to Ideas

Strangers coming together around scissors, glue and quotes from Bourdieu. And leaving with images that say something about who they are. Workshop produced in collaboration with Guillaume Cuny and the team at Le Local community centre.

On Saturday 28 March 2026, I led a photography and collage workshop at Le Local community centre in Poitiers, as part of the 20^th edition of the Festival Raisons d’Agir, whose theme was “Dominant media, resistant media”. It was the last day of the festival, from 2pm to 4pm. Sixteen images were created. They are all available online on this page, with a detailed description of each collage at the end of the article. Things did not go as I had planned, and that is what made the afternoon so rich.

Festival Raisons d’Agir: twenty years of critical thinking in Poitiers

The Festival Raisons d’Agir has existed for twenty years. Born in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s thought and the Raisons d’Agir publishing house, it brings together, each year in Poitiers, academics, artists, activists and media professionals. The 2026 edition, which ran from 21 to 28 March, posed a central question: how does information circulate today, and what forms of resistance are being organised against the various forms of media domination?

Lectures, screenings, debates, theatre performances and workshops followed one another over the course of a week in several venues across Poitiers: Espace Mendès-France, the La Belle Aventure bookshop, the TAP Cinema and Le Local community centre. It was Guillaume Cuny, a senior lecturer in education sciences at the University of Poitiers and an active member of the association, who proposed the theme for this edition and who thought of inviting me. Guillaume and I have known each other for a long time. He had been an intern with me years ago, as part of the “Éducation aux images 2.1” action-research programme I was running, on the subject of teenagers and cinema.

What I had prepared

My initial idea was twofold. On the one hand, photographs in which participants would stage themselves physically, outdoors or in the room, on the theme of media. On the other hand, collages made from magazine cuttings, leaflets and printed quotations: Pierre Bourdieu, Guy Debord, Noam Chomsky, Edward Bernays, as well as phrases from the festival itself. All on black or cream paper supports. I had brought a camera tethered to my laptop, a projector to display the creations on the wall in real time, a QR code so that everyone could leave with all the images on their phone, and a softbox to photograph the collages in good conditions.

I had also told Guillaume and Maïssa, the community worker at Le Local, not to hesitate to create things themselves. This is something I feel strongly about: the person leading the workshop is not above the group, they are part of it. When people arrive and see that we too are cutting, searching, gluing, it changes everything. It says: we are all in the same energy, there is nothing at stake, we are enjoying ourselves.

The group takes shape

The group formed gradually. People arrived, sat down. Some had come specifically for this, others were passing by and stayed. What struck me first was that nobody knew each other. There was Michel, a retired university professor who had first worked for fourteen years at the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Juan, a young man who did not know anyone. Séverine, who worked at UNICEF. Maïssa, the community worker at Le Local. Guillaume and Louise, festival organisers. And people who dropped in, staying five minutes or an hour.

There was a moment, quite early on, that mattered. Séverine said: “I don’t know anyone here.” She said it as though it were a confession, as though she were the only one in that situation. I replied that I didn’t either — I only knew one person here, Guillaume. And Juan added: “I don’t know anyone.” This kind of moment could easily be let slip. But this is where everything is at play. My answer was true: I did indeed only know Guillaume. But it is also a levelling gesture. When the person leading the workshop says “me neither”, the person who felt like an outsider understands that they belong. We are all in the same situation. We can begin.

Cutting as a space of trust

I had proposed two activities in parallel: collage and group photography. But very quickly, I sensed that the group was forming around the table, around the scissors and paper. I told Guillaume: “I think we’ll just do collage — I feel there’s something to dig into here.” Staged photographs might have been a bit superficial. Whereas cutting is personal. You sit down, you leaf through, you cut out an image without quite knowing why. You let yourself be drawn in.

This is something I have learned over the course of many workshops: you should advise people to start with images, not with text. When you are looking for a specific text, it is harder than when you simply let yourself be attracted by an image. The image comes from the unconscious. The text will come later, to name what the image has already said.

Cutting also has the virtue that while you cut, you talk. The hands are busy, and speech flows freely. The conversation drifted from the “Dallas shot” (the low-angle framing of tower blocks that journalism students are taught, and which someone had heard about the day before at the festival) to gender stereotypes in national education campaigns, from the working conditions of young precarious journalists to Eva Illouz’s work on the tyranny of happiness, from the first photograph ever taken by Nicéphore Niepce in 1827 to Arte’s digital strategy. Everyone brought something — an experience, an indignation, an anecdote. Michel talked about his years at the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Louise spoke about the death of Brigitte Bardot and the way the media had reduced her to her beauty. Guillaume described an exercise he does with his students, comparing how different newspapers cover the same news story. And all the while, the scissors kept working, guided by the unconscious.

The care given to images

When a collage was finished, I would photograph it, then sit down with the person in front of the screen to crop it and adjust the brightness. This moment matters enormously. It is a moment of attention to what the person has made. We discuss: “Do you prefer more contrast?”, “Do we leave the black border or crop tighter?”, “What if we pushed the colours a bit?” The person watches their collage transform into an image, take on a different quality. And then I ask: “What do you call it?”

The title is the moment when the image says what it means. Sometimes it comes immediately. Louise said “Can the billionaire escape his condition?” in one breath. Sometimes you have to circle around it. For Séverine, we hesitated between “Divine light”, “Blue light”, “Chiaroscuro”. She settled on “Blue screen”. For Maïssa, we searched together for something around creativity, and the group helped her find “Married to art”, a play on words between a married woman and a woman wedded to creation. For Guillaume’s collage with a woman standing on a table surrounded by empty chairs, he had no inspiration. Someone said: “Garden furniture.” And it was perfect.

Each image, once titled and signed with the creator’s first name, was uploaded behind the QR code. Participants could find it on their phone, download it, show it to others. I watched Michel try several times to download his, getting muddled, starting over. He was faster than the teenagers, but in the wrong direction. We figured it out together in the end. That small moment of technical clumsiness is also part of building trust: no one is judging, we help each other.

What emerged in the images

What struck me, watching the collages accumulate on the screen, was the recurrence of certain motifs. The phrase “Turn off your TV. Turn on your mind” appeared in four different collages, without people having conferred. Juan had used it as the title of his minimalist collage — a vast white emptiness with a small TV set at the bottom. Guillaume had integrated it into “The priority”, a first-aid scene where the woman is the one who knows and the man is the one who needs help. Séverine had buried it in an explosion of colours and torn words. Each time the same phrase, and each time a completely different visual language.

Guy Debord also ran through several collages. His phrase about the “bad dream of modern society in chains” had found two translations: in Guillaume’s piece, a woman cycling with a pink flamingo float; in Louise’s, a giant teddy bear with a fairground ride on its head. Same quotation, two opposing images, and yet both work.

I also created two collages during the workshop. The first, “Culture”, in which I bombarded a haute couture fashion figure with quotations from Debord, Bourdieu and Chomsky. It is a bit head-on. The second, “We all think alike”, is more personal. I used the first photograph ever taken, by Nicéphore Niepce, which we had discussed during the afternoon, and inserted it into a light bulb cut from gold paper, alongside masked figures — a reference to Covid — and the phrase “When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking.” One participant noticed that the light bulb looked like a potato. He was right: Niepce had in fact used potato starch to fix the first photographs in the world. You cannot make up coincidences like these. They happen when the group is in a state of trust and associations of ideas flow freely.

The path to giving yourself permission

There was a moment when Louise apologised for not having made something “very polished”. I told her that in what is spontaneous, there is a different kind of energy, a very interesting one. It is a moment I know well from workshops. People arrive with the idea that they have to do well, that what they produce will be judged, that they are not artists. And then they cut. And then they glue. And then they understand that everything is allowed.

Guillaume put it well towards the end: “It’s true that not thinking too long, letting yourself be carried by what you discover — it’s funny, what happens in spite of ourselves.” And someone added: “At first you think, what can I possibly make? And then you understand that everything is allowed.” That journey, from doubt to permission, is the heart of this kind of workshop. It is easy to say, but not so easy to live through. And the collective helps. There is nothing at stake — the others are doing it too.

One participant also pointed out something that touched me: the fact that the printed quotations had helped her find her footing. Other people’s words — Bourdieu’s or Debord’s — placed alongside her own cut-out images, gave her something to hold on to. You do not have to invent everything from scratch. You can start from what already exists to say something new. That is precisely why I prepare these quotations: not to impose a discourse, but to offer handholds.

It is also a question of confidence, particularly for women. Séverine remarked on it: the need to feel validated before speaking, to apologise before expressing oneself, is a very common pattern. Collage, because it works through the hands and not through speech, offers an indirect path to saying things one might not dare put into words. And the title you give at the end is the moment when you own what you have made. “I think therefore I disturb,” wrote Maïssa. It takes courage to write that.

The digital as a new aura

Towards the end of the workshop, I had a conversation with Guillaume that has been on my mind for a while. I am currently writing about the relationship between the original and its digital reproduction. Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, wrote that the original possesses an aura that the reproduction cannot have. Yet in this workshop, as in others I have led, the opposite occurred. The physical collages, made of paper and glue, took on another dimension once photographed, cropped, contrast-adjusted and put online. The digital reproduction had more presence than the original.

Guillaume suggested a hypothesis: it is a museographic effect. Taking an object, extracting it from its context, presenting it — that changes how you look at it. I think he is right, but I think it goes further. The digital is no longer a space of mere reproduction. It has become a mode of existence, ubiquitous and shared. When participants scan the QR code and find all the images on their phone, when they take them home, when they look at them a month later, the image takes on a different value. You discover new ways of reading it.

I experienced this vividly two years ago, during a workshop at the Museum of the Great War in Meaux. The workshop had lasted three weeks, and three weeks later we exhibited the works at the museum. Participants came back, and told us it was thanks to the QR code that they had returned. Because the images had continued to exist in their daily digital life. In the mind, memories fade. On a phone, they remain. And they call you back. They build us.

Images in the service of all

These sixteen collages are now available online. The Festival Raisons d’Agir can use them to illustrate its website, its communications, its future editions. They are creative, original images, made by people who appropriated the festival’s theme in their own way. They are not illustrations of a discourse on media. They are a discourse on media, formulated by hands and scissors, in an afternoon when strangers shared a pleasure that surprised even themselves.

Because that is what it is really about, in the end. A festival on dominant media and resistant media cannot simply denounce domination. It must offer spaces where each person experiences what it means to think for themselves. And thinking for yourself begins with daring to express yourself. Daring to place an image next to a word. Daring to give it a title. Daring to say “Why the long face?” to a world that would rather you smiled.

Appendix: the sixteen images from the workshop

“Snake charmer” (Guillaume) — On a black background, a photograph of a hand resting on sand, holding a plastic bottle from which a small snake seems to flow. Below, a quotation from Bourdieu’s On Television: “Symbolic violence is a violence exercised with the tacit complicity of those who suffer it.” The image is sober, almost documentary, and it is the juxtaposition of the charmer’s gesture and Bourdieu’s phrase that creates meaning: media seduction as gentle manipulation, which we lend ourselves to.

“Meanders” (Guillaume) — A dense collage on a black background. Behind, an urban landscape: tower blocks behind a fence, a river meandering through grass. Over this, a large bottle of Penfolds Grange (a luxury Australian wine, vintage 2018) and, in the lower left, a television studio where two people talk in orange armchairs. The phrase “Trivial news is a diversion” ties it all together. The group discussed this image at length — the cohabitation of the working-class neighbourhood, the luxury product, the TV studio and the river. Guillaume found the title in this idea of meanders: everything winds — the watercourse, the wine, the information.

“Freedom” (Michel) — An entanglement of cut-out bodies, arms, torsos, faces, in pink and warm tones, almost carnal. Gazes crossing, bare skin, a young man in a black sweatshirt with his eyes closed, a Black woman facing us with a direct gaze. In the middle, the quotation: “The greatest danger to freedom does not come from those who would abolish it, but from those who have grown accustomed to it.” The group read in this accumulation of bodies the full ambiguity of the word “freedom”: appearances, beliefs, a world where freedom is so present that it is no longer seen.

“Can the billionaire escape his condition?” (Louise) — On a cream background with a black border, a bottle of Amour de Deutz champagne sits at the centre, wrapped in large yellow flowers. Around it, a man holding his head in his hands, a fragment of the European flag, a luxury hotel, a “Seek and Find” game, the word “WOLF”, “HERITAGE”, “A BESPOKE EXPERIENCE”, “THE MIDDLE KINGDOM”. And at the top, Bourdieu: “I prefer to rid myself of false enchantments so I can marvel at true miracles.” The group looked for the wolf in the image. It is everywhere and nowhere. Is the champagne a false or a true enchantment? And the flowers behind the bottle?

“Turn off your TV and turn on your mind” (Juan) — The most minimalist collage of the afternoon. A vast white space, almost empty. At the top centre, the phrase in large letters: “TURN OFF YOUR TV. TURN ON YOUR MIND.” At the very bottom left, a small dark television set on a piece of furniture. At the very bottom right, a figure sitting in an armchair, book in hand, with a lamp above his head from which hand-drawn yellow rays emanate. The empty space between the two says everything: the path from the switched-off screen to the switched-on mind is a void you must dare to cross.

“Blue screen” (Séverine) — An explosion of colour: bright yellow, sky blue, hot pink. Words torn from paper: “Think movement”, “Escape”, “Conquer fear”, “Come alive”. Dark sculptural figures, almost menacing, piled on top of one another. A small monk raising his finger to his lips. And at the bottom, once more: “TURN OFF YOUR TV. TURN ON YOUR MIND.” The same message as Juan’s, but in an entirely different language — a call to movement, to colour, to physical escape from the screen.

“Spirit, are you there?” (Séverine) — On a black background, two figures face to face: on the left, a white-haired woman in black and white, covering her mouth with her hand. On the right, a man in colour, leaning forward, binoculars or a camera aimed at us. Between them, handwritten on blue paper: “Remove your blinkers”. Below: “INTELLECTUAL SELF-DEFENCE”. And also: “Open your mind”, “Take your distance”. Who is watching and who is silenced? Who observes and who is reduced to silence?

“The priority” (Guillaume) — On a black background, a first-aid scene: a woman in a white coat, calm and self-assured, faces a man in a red jacket gesticulating with open hands. Between them, a training mannequin and a defibrillator. The message “TURN OFF YOUR TV. TURN ON YOUR MIND.” is pasted between their two faces. Below, in red: “FIRST AID PROCEDURES”. She is the one who knows, she is the one who is calm, and he is the one who needs help. And this first aid is not for the body — it is for the mind.

“Why the long face?” (Louise) — On a white background, fragments of faces float in the upper part of the image: just eyes, foreheads, mouths, cut from magazines. All serious, all closed. None smiling. At the bottom, two groups of riot police in full gear, helmeted, armed, massive, forming two dark pillars. Louise had been looking for faces that were not smiling in the magazines, and it was hard: most people smile in the press. She found one in every five or six.

“Married to art” (Maïssa) — The most baroque collage of the lot. An exuberant accumulation: a central female figure in a purple jacket, the word “MARRIED” in large black letters, “TO” and “ART.” in white, “Music”, “Sounds”, “champion”, “beautiful”, “energy!”, “STYLISH”. Headphones, red boots, Japanese cups, women in colourful outfits, a museum facade. Maïssa had struggled to find texts that spoke to her, and the group helped.

“I think differently” (Maïssa) — On a black background, two elements: on the left, a torn photograph of a group of young women, intense gaze, a “Hollywood” t-shirt. On the right, a figure cut from a fashion magazine — tall, blonde, white dress, designer bag. Above: “I THINK THEREFORE”. Below: “I DISTURB.” The subversion of the Cartesian cogito says it all: thinking for yourself means being a disturbance. And the confrontation between the two images of women raises the question of who has the right to think and to disturb.

“The bad dream” (Guillaume) — On a black background, a woman on a bicycle with a pink flamingo float around her body. The image has something joyful and absurd about it — an endless summer. Pasted over it, the quotation from Guy Debord: “The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its desire to sleep.” The contrast between the lightness of the image and the harshness of the words creates a shock.

“Garden furniture” (Guillaume) — On a black background with an apple-green floor, a woman with a head disproportionately large for her body, standing on a small round table, arms crossed, confident smile. Around her, empty metal garden chairs. Debord’s quotation: “In a world that really has been turned upside down, truth is a moment of falsehood.” The title “Garden furniture” brings this surreal scene back to something banal, everyday, trivial.

“Culture” (Benoît) — My first collage. On a black background, a fashion model in haute couture, pearls and handbag, literally bombarded with quotations. Debord, Bourdieu, Chomsky jostle around her: “Culture, having become completely commodified, must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society”, “The rich buy the media to deliver their carefully chosen message to the poor”, “Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to dictatorship”. A figure of luxury buried under the words that decode her.

“We all think alike” (Benoît) — My second collage. On a black background, three figures in white coats and masks — a reference to the obligations of the Covid period — photographed in black and white. Around them, a bright blue circle, and on the left, a light bulb cut from gold paper into which is inserted the very first photograph in the world, by Nicéphore Niepce, which the group had discussed earlier that afternoon. On the right, a speech bubble: “When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking.” One participant made the connection between the light bulb and a potato — Niepce used potato starch to fix his images.

“I’d like to sleep a little longer” (Louise) — On a black background, a large white teddy bear, standing, smiling, with a fairground ride resembling a luminous octopus on its head. On the left, torn shapes in ochre and orange tones, the word “INSPIRE”, multicoloured confetti, fragments of blue paper. At the bottom, Debord: “The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its desire to sleep.” The teddy bear, childhood, the fairground ride, the dream: the title “I’d like to sleep a little longer” can be read as a refusal to open one’s eyes to the world, or as a longing for gentleness in a world that is too harsh.